Commuters cry foul as BMTC set to cut ties with digital pass provider

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: Thousands of city bus commuters have expressed anger against Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation's (BMTC) move to cut ties with Tummoc, a private startup which enables passengers to buy digital passes through their application.

During April 2022, the BMTC launched the digital pass system allowing commuters to buy daily, weekly and monthly passes through the Tummoc application. While passengers hoped that they would be able to soon buy tickets through the same application.

The project, however, slowed down after the managing director V Anub Kumar was transferred. In the month of January alone, the BMTC sold passes worth Rs 5 crores through the application. From 4,500 digital passes being sold in April 2022, the number has significantly risen to 1.5 lakh passes in the last month.

The transport corporation has raked in revenue after the application was introduced, helping the fund starved department. The current managing director, G Sathyavathi, has said that the corporation does not have a contract with Tummoc but only a memorandum of understanding. She has justified the decision claiming that private institutions may have “vested interests”.

She added that the BMTC with internal resources is coming up with a robust digital ticketing and passes system. However, the history of BMTC with technology has not been great so far. In 2016, the BMTC had launched its first app, and it did not turn out to be successful. It launched another in 2019 which also crashed owing to technical glitches.

The BMTC has been buying time to release its application Nimmbus, citing that they are working on the errors identified during the trial run. Commuters are upset over the issue and want the Tummoc application to be operational until the corporation rolls out a reliable application of its own. Since the introduction of the app, passengers no longer have to wait in long queues at designated bus stops.

“A startup working on an MoU without asking money from BMTC is working well, while an app BMTC paid for is never seeing the light of day, any guesses why?,” said Sathya Sankaran, the bicycle mayor of the city. “How hard is it in a tech city like Bengaluru to solicit help from tech leaders to find the right solution?,” said Revathy Ashok, a member of Bangalore Political Action Committee (BPAC)