With the aim of enhancing the safety of women and girls, public passenger transport vehicles in the State will be equipped with location tracking devices and emergency buttons for raising an alert in case of an emergency.
Panic buttons will be set up in all passenger transport vehicles, except three-wheelers, for the travellers to send alerts during emergencies, speeding, rash driving, and in case of harassment or misbehaviour.
Through the 24x7 GPS-based tracking and monitoring platform, the real-time monitoring of the vehicles can be undertaken and law-enforcers and rescuers can rush in immediately in case of emergency or accident.
The government has given the administrative sanction for the development, customisation, deployment and management of State-wise Vehicle Tracking Platform for safety and enforcement as per AIS-140 specification under the Nirbhaya framework.
The funds being made available will be used for upgrading the infrastructure and software as more vehicles will have to be covered as per the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) guidelines.
In 2018 itself, a real-time 24x7 GPS-based tracking and monitoring platform for the public transport vehicles was introduced in the State. Developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) for the Motor Vehicles Department, the master control room of ‘Suraksha-Mitr,’ the vehicle tracking management system (VTMS), is at the Transport Commissionerate in Trans Tower here.
For implementation of the enlarged scheme, 60% of the allocation will be from the Centre and the remaining 40% from the State government. In addition to the ₹80 lakh provided in the budget, the Centre has sanctioned and released ₹5.79 crore as the first instalment out of the project cost of ₹20.35 crore as per the MoRTH guidelines.
