Why common mobility card is finding few takers in Bengaluru

Sanika Athavale / TNN / Jun 24, 2023, 07:17 IST

Text Size

Small
Medium
Large

You're reading

Why common mobility card is finding few takers in Bengaluru
Here’s your perfect weekend watch - make way for 2023’s biggest action flick - John Wick: Chapter 4, on Prime Video Channels with a Lionsgate Play subscription
Investment con: Bengaluru woman loses Rs 2.9 lakh in 2 days
Politically motivated, says Karnataka minister KH Muniyappa after Centre's 'no' to rice demand again

Why common mobility card is finding few takers in Bengaluru

NCMC held by visitors to Bengaluru may not be accepted by BMRCL ticketing machines

BENGALURU: National Common Mobility Card (NCMC), which was launched for the city in late March, is not eliciting the expected response, say officials at Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited.
Against 8 lakh in-house smartcards sold by BMRCL, only 4,500 NCMCs have been issued in Bengaluru till date. NCMC was launched during the inauguration of Whitefield-KR Puram line by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in March.

TimesView

One nation, one mobility card may be an alluring slogan. But National Common Mobility Card cannot stand on empty rhetoric. It has to be truly national, in the sense that those holding it must be able to seamlessly access its benefits across cities. Besides, there is nothing uniform about mobilityacross the country. In Mumbai, heavily subsidised local trains are the lifeline of commuters, but in Delhi, it is the Metro. In Bengaluru, BMTC shoulders the brunt of public transport burden. That two transport utilities of Bengaluru, BMTC and BMRCL, have been unable to decide on common mobility card is only a pointer to the many hurdles that lie in the path of any such card.

BMRCL officials say barring in Mumbai, NCMC seems to have run into a common problem across all other Metro cities. “This is probably because Mumbai’s transport agencies did not have their own (smart) cards until NCMC was launched there. Hence, its use is widespread in Mumbai, but Kolkata , Kochi, Bengaluru and Delhi are big on their own agencies’ cards,” said Anjum Parvez, managing director, BMRCL.

As per the operations and maintenance division of BMRCL, lately the agency has been selling 30-35 NCMCs per day. But why is the card, meant to enable seamless travel and payment, not a hot favourite as it was meant to be? TOI spoke to stakeholders and identified five major reasons:

Start a Conversation

FacebookTwitterInstagramKOO APPYOUTUBE