Day 5 | PMPML yet to catch up with BRTS tech: Doors of 100 buses fail to open

As part of the plans to celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, the main building of Aga Khan Palace will be restored, the picture gallery will be refurbished and a digital, interactive display of Gandhi’s works will be organised, said an ASI official

A bus whose door didn’t open automatically, outside the BRTS lane at Dapodi on Tuesday.

On the fifth consecutive day after its launch, the Bus Rapid Transport System (BRTS) track between Nigdi and Dapodi continued to cause confusion among commuters as PMPML buses plied on the track built for them, but also used the service road outside.

By evening, it was revealed that at least 100 buses had skipped the BRTS lane as they couldn’t get the door on the right side of the bus open, where the bus stops are located. Officials of the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) said the doors didn’t open because PMPML had failed to activate the range frequency (RF) tag. “The RF tags help open and close the door automatically,” said PCMC officials.

PMPML officials have also failed to activate the Intelligent Transport Management System (ITMS), which is needed to operate the digital boards at the bus stops. “Between Nigdi to Dapodi, ITMS was operational only at the HA Colony stop. Otherwise, at all other bus stations, ITMS failed to operate,” said Vijay Bhojne, in-charge of PCMC’s BRTS department. In the absence of ITMS, PMPML has posted ‘controllers’ at some bus stations to make announcements regarding bus arrivals, said Bhojne, adding, “this is causing confusion among commuters”. He said the PCMC had given enough time to PMPML to install the ITMS system and activate it. “We had informed them at least four months in advance,” he said.

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PMPML CMD Nayana Gunde, however, said it will take at least three to four days to get the RF tag and ITMS activated. “Some of the buses malfunctioned and we couldn’t get things in order,” she said.

General manager of the transport body, Dattatrya Mane, said they were supposed to provide 273 buses for the Nigdi-Dapodi route. “Currently, 160 buses have been provided RF tags and the work of installing RF tags on the remaining buses is underway,” he said.

Mane said the process of installing RF tags on older buses was difficult and most buses were five to seven years old. “It is easy to install the RF tag on new buses,” he said.

Manoj Dattatrye More

Manoj More has been working with the Indian Express since 1992. For the first 16 years, he worked on the desk, edited stories, made pages, wrote special stories and handled The Indian Express edition. In 31 years of his career, he has regularly written stories on a range of topics, primarily on civic issues like state of roads, choked drains, garbage problems, inadequate transport facilities and the like. He has also written aggressively on local gondaism. He has primarily written civic stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad, Khadki, Maval and some parts of Pune. He has also covered stories from Kolhapur, Satara, Solapur, Sangli, Ahmednagar and Latur. He has had maximum impact stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial city which he has covered extensively for the last three decades. Manoj More has written over 20,000 stories. 10,000 of which are byline stories. Most of the stories pertain to civic issues and political ones. The biggest achievement of his career is getting a nearly two kilometre road done on Pune-Mumbai highway in Khadki in 2006. He wrote stories on the state of roads since 1997. In 10 years, nearly 200 two-wheeler riders had died in accidents due to the pathetic state of the road. The local cantonment board could not get the road redone as it lacked funds. The then PMC commissioner Pravin Pardeshi took the initiative, went out of his way and made the Khadki road by spending Rs 23 crore from JNNURM Funds. In the next 10 years after the road was made by the PMC, less than 10 citizens had died, effectively saving more than 100 lives. Manoj More's campaign against tree cutting on Pune-Mumbai highway in 1999 and Pune-Nashik highway in 2004 saved 2000 trees. During Covid, over 50 doctors were asked to pay Rs 30 lakh each for getting a job with PCMC. The PCMC administration alerted Manoj More who did a story on the subject, asking then corporators how much money they demanded....The story worked as doctors got the job without paying a single paisa. Manoj More has also covered the "Latur drought" situation in 2015 when a "Latur water train" created quite a buzz in Maharashtra. He also covered the Malin tragedy where over 150 villagers had died. Manoj More is on Facebook with 4.9k followers (Manoj More), on twitter manojmore91982 ... Read More

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