In tune with the Modi Government’s ‘Make-in-India’ initiative, the Union Urban Development Ministry is seeking to indigenously develop electronic gates at the entry and exit points for the Metros to cut down expenditure cost as well as curb ‘outflow of wealth’.
Presently, a few companies from abroad are enjoying monopoly in manufacturing these gates costing around `5 lakh each to the Government. The Ministry’s decision to manufacture these structures in-house came in view of increasing demand for metros coming up across the country and ‘curb outflow of wealth’. (See Box)
This was decided at a meeting of the Committee for Standards and Specifications of National Common Mobility Card under the chairmanship of DS Mishra, UD additional secretary held recently which was attended by senior officials from the UD Ministry and other stakeholders.
The panel asked the Bangalore-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) to explore the ways of constructing the Metro gates and complete eco-system around it to do away the dependency on the foreign firms.
CDAC is the premier R&D organisation of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Ministry of Communications & Information Technology (MCIT) for carrying out R&D in IT, Electronics and associated areas.
“For Metro gates, standards and hardware should be developed by the CDAC with the financial assistance provided by the Ministry. As these are presently proprietary items of only a few overseas companies who supply these in the Indian market. This will bring down the overall cost of the hardware developed indigenously,” suggested the committee.
Sources in the UD Ministry said that fund has already been allocated to the CDAC to conduct the study in this regard.
The panel also said that rest of the standards such as may be provided by the National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI), an umbrella organisation for all retail payments system in India.
It was set up with the guidance and support of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and Indian Banks’ Association (IBA).
Further, the panel said the components including those for clearing settlement and dispute management infrastructure for the metros could be developed by the NPCI. It has been mandated to build central infrastructure for payment systems like ATM switching, mobile payments and cheque truncation system among others.