The State Transport Authority (STA) on Thursday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) for development, management and operation of Vehicle Location Tracking (VLT) application.

The agreement was signed by Dhananjaya Senapati, Additional Commissioner Transport (Technical) and Pradeep Kumar Mallick, General Manager, BSNL, Cuttack.

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Under the Nirbhaya Scheme for women’s safety, the Central government has made vehicle location tracking system mandatory for public transport vehicles and goods vehicles. In accordance with the directions issued by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH),Odisha  STA will implement VLT application for Safety and Enforcement as per AIS-140 Standard to track the public transport and commercial vehicles in Odisha under the Nirbhaya framework.

BSNL under ‘Vahan Suraksha’ model will develop, deploy, integrate and commission a vehicle location tracking software for tracking and monitoring of vehicles covered under the project.  The organisation will also develop mobile applications for various stakeholders and users and commission Geographic Information System (GIS) maps for vehicle location tracking systems.

“The objective of the project is to introduce a tracking system as required for implementation of central notifications for continuous monitoring of public transport vehicles for safety of passengers, better road safety and better support for enforcement services. This will also help in keeping track of public buses running as per the permit”, Arun Bothra, Transport Commissioner said.

A command control center is being set up in Bhubaneswar to track the vehicles plying across the state. The 24X7 integrated command centre will use both Global Positioning System (GPS)-based vehicle tracking and the GSM/GPRS channel for triggering emergency alerts.

The common emergency toll lines, motor vehicles wing, the police control room and related enforcement units will be looped into a real-time data sharing network with the command centre functioning as an interface for stakeholder agencies.