Bridge collapse: Faulty e-ticket system leaves passenger count a mystery

While authorities tried to figure out exact number of vehicles that plunged into Savitri River, after bridge collapse on Mumbai-Goa highway, the number of passengers seemed to elude them as well. Despite having the Electronic Ticketing Issuing Machine (ETIM) on both the State Transport (ST) buses, the information on the number of people on board has not been fed back to the servers.

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Speaking to mid-day, Additional Superintendent of Police (Konkan Range) Sanjaykumar Patil said, "As per information from Chiplun ST depot, both ST buses - Jaigad-Mumbai bearing number MH-20-BN-1538 with driver Shamrao Kamble (58) and conductor was Vilas Desai (43), had nine passengers and a total of 11 people on board, when the bus left from Chiplun. The Rajapur-Borivili bus bearing number MH-40-N-9739 with driver Goraknath Munde (46) and conductor Prabhakar Shirke (58) had 9 passengers. In total, the buses had 22 people."

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22 or 17?
However, MSRTC officials claim that the actual number of passengers on board of both buses was only 17, of which most of the passengers had taken a ticket only after getting into the bus and only five of them had a reservation. "While the incident occurred at 11.30 pm, for almost over 12 hours, MSRTC did not even have the actual number of passengers on board, despite the conductor having ETIM," said a senior police officer.

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Pit stop
Preliminary inquires have revealed that after leaving from Chiplun both buses had to stop at Khed, Poladpur and were scheduled to reach Mahad ST stand by midnight. However, the ST server has no information about the number of passengers who boarded or alighted from the buses on these two stops.

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When inquired about the discrepancies, Additional Superintendents of police (Konkan range) Sanjaykumar Patil said, "We were coordinating with MSRTC officials who informed us about facing some technical glitches to extract details from their server and therefore we decided to go ahead with the details we could get from Chiplun ST stand."

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Regarding passengers boarding or alighting at Khed and Polhadpur, Patil admitted the numbers might have a variation.

Meanwhile MSRTC Managing Director, Ranjit Singh Deol said, "We got the number of people by early morning, but we could not ascertain the names of the passengers and by afternoon we could gather the names of those on board both the buses as per our information."

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mid-day has learnt that MSRTC issued the contract to M/s Trimax Infrastructure and Services Limited for setting up the entire ETIM networking and machines for buses between 2008-2009. The company also won a recent tender for setting up ticketing system and smart cards, which is already operational in 250 ST depots.

Confirming the same, Yogesh Dhakras, vice president (Transport), Trimax said, "As soon as the query was raised to us, we provided all the required information from the server. We must understand that the crew of both the buses changed at Chiplun, which also means the ETIM machine and also waybill would be only with the conductors who would have travelled from Chiplun towards Mumbai, until the actual waybill number of the machine is not received, it would be difficult to track information from server."

"We are confident that even in this case, once the search operators track the ETIM, we will be able to ascertain the actual number of passengers on board, as these machine are GPRS connected," he said.

Nowhere to escape
Possibilities of an escape for passengers in the ST buses were slim, since the door of the bus was locked from the inside. There was no emergency or safety gear in the bus to help passengers get out and stay afloat till they were rescued. MSRTC Managing Director Ranjit Singh Deol said, "Our buses are designed as per the prescribed safety norms, with two entry and exit doors and emergency exit windows. However, we will be discussing other improvement points in our internal meeting and take it forward accordingly."