India News | Delhi Metro's NCMC Upgrade Project to Be on Target: DMRC Top Official

New Delhi, Apr 1 (PTI) Upgrading of Delhi Metro's existing automatic fare collection systems to make them compliant with the National Common Mobility Card (NCMC) services is to be completed by June 2023, and the project will be on target, a top DMRC official has said.

The AFC system in the upcoming corridors under Phase-IV will be fully compliant with the NCMC, he said.

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Mangu Singh, on Thursday bid an emotional farewell to the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation after an illustrious career of 25 years at the urban transporter, including the last decade as its top boss.

In an interview to PTI on the last day of his office, he shared his sentiments about his long journey with the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), and status of some of the major projects which the corporations has been executing under his leadership.

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"Upgrading of existing automatic fare collection systems to make them compliant with the NCMC services is to be completed by June 2023, and the project will be on target," he said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in March 2019 had launched the indigenously-developed NCMC to enable people to pay multiple kinds of transport charges, including for metro and bus services across the country, through a common card.

Dubbed as 'One Nation One Card', the interoperable transport card would allow the holders to also pay their toll taxes, parking charges, retail shopping and even withdraw money.

The Delhi Metro had recently started the process to upgrade all its existing AFC systems to make them compliant with the NCMC services. The work is expected to be completed by June 2023, officials had earlier said.

The DMRC has entered into a contract with a consortium for executing the NCMC along with upgrade of complete ecosystem consisting of AFC system which will also enable travel though "QR-based tickets, account-based ticket and near field communications (NFC) media".

On December 28, 2020, Prime Minister Modi had launched the NCMC services on the Airport Express Line.

This service also enables passengers from any part of the country to use their NCMC-compliant RuPay debit card for seamless travel. The same card can also be used for shopping, banking transactions etc., across the country.

DMRC's system will be able to accept transactions from 23 banks through the RuPay debit card issued by them, officials had then said.

Emphasising that technology will play a very important role for five-six years for the DMRC, Singh also said that work to upgrade old signalling technology has begun with Red Line.

"Line no. 1 (Red Line) will be the first where we have already started changing the automatic train supervision system, with what we have developed indigenously, i-ATS," he said.

Asked about the timeline for this project, he said, "It is a bit early to decide on that because these signalling systems are quite costly and unnecessarily changing and upgrading it will cost unnecessarily".

Final field trials of the first-ever indigenously developed signalling technology was virtually inaugurated on the Red Line of the Delhi Metro late March.

India's first-ever Indigenous Automatic Train Supervision System (i-ATS) has been developed by a joint team of DMRC and Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), officials said.

The DMRC network's current span is nearly 392 km with 286 stations, including the Noida-Greater Noida Metro Corridor and Rapid Metro in Gurgaon.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)