Deepro Ganguly heads marketing for Mapmyindia, a Delhi-based company with annual revenue touching Rs 100 crore, after having grown 800 per cent in the past five years. It is one of the few Indian firms providing both navigation and surveillance devices. However, Ganguly shies away from bidding for government contracts.
In Pune, Saumil Dhru, chief operating officer and chief technology officer of Arya Omnitalk Wireless Solutions, an equal joint venture between Arvind and Mumbai-based end-to-end logistics firm J M Baxi & Co, employs 400 people. It has serviced Delhi Police vans, radio taxis and corporate fleets. But, like Ganguly, he draws the line at government contracts to equip urban transport vehicles. (THE POLITICS OF GPS)
Both point to the low entry barriers in the surveillance industry. This, they say, has led to small, unorganised players bagging government tenders, especially some big ones floated by the Delhi Integrated Multi-Modal Transit System or DIMTS, a public-private partnership that oversees projects in urban transport and is being audited by the Comptroller and Auditor General or CAG.
"In government tenders, there are so many unorganised players. There is no point in putting time and energy in these," said Dhru of Arya Omnitalk.
"It is very opaque. There is way too much confusion," said Mapmyindia's Ganguly. He says a multiplicity of multi-nodal agencies in urban transport has led to this. "As stakeholders, companies are facing the brunt of it."
GPS-based devices are high on the priority list of government-run transport departments after a gang-rape in Delhi on a bus in December 2012 led to the death of a 23-year-old student. The bus was plying illegally and its driver was involved in the crime, which led to street protests and a national outcry.
Cluster buses, part of public transport in the capital, are, by rule, fitted with GPS. This contract is overseen by DIMTS.
That's not all. A Rs 1,000-crore rolling Nirbhaya Fund set up by the outgoing UPA government seeks to fit women and their means of transport with tracking devices. One big-ticket proposal is to fit public transport in 32 cities, besides private buses, with this equipment. DIMTS is also overseeing the equipping of Delhi's autorickshaws with GPS-based trackers, an issue which led to a strike earlier this month. Two autorickshaw drivers Business Standard spoke to said most old autos, with only one year left in a 14-year road contract, went off the roads to protest against this costly change. With the government ready to farm out one transport surveillance contract after another, experts worry about the lack of regulation in place to keep out unorganised entities who might be importing unreliable equipment. They say a double whammy is that these players are unlikely to have sophisticated back-end operations. GPS-based tracking, while primarily used for fleet management, has another use. It can help in allowing control rooms to respond quickly to a distress call from, say, a female passenger travelling on a Delhi bus. At the moment, though, the Delhi bus cluster system is not connected to any police control room.
Not only cost
"(We suggest) don't mandate the lowest cost solution just to comply with a regulation. In Delhi's DIMTS projects, the type of devices are just to fulfill a mandate," said Dhru of Arya Omnitalk, which has equipped fleets of, and run back-end for, multinationals, Coal India and Bangalore Metro Transport Corporation, and has a manufacturing plant in Pune.
He suggests the government give equal importance to technical and price bids before choosing vendors. DIMTS Chief Executive Sanjiv Sahai said his organisation has a list of empanelled or authorised vendors and their devices. While Mapmyindia and Arya Omnitalk are on this list, the companies have not participated in supplying any devices. This is because the cost criteria at which these are demanded is unrealistic.
The cluster bus contract, for instance, was won by a consortium that includes Sobha Applied DSP, a company that also bid for GPS in tuk-tuks, and is quoted by a Financial Times blog in 2011 as an outfit of listed real estate company Sobha Developers. When Business Standard got in touch with Sobha Applied DSP, the company said it no longer had a tie-up with the Sobha arm, Shobha Renaissance Information Technology. It is keeping the Sobha name, though, said P Senthil Kumar, an official. He said the company, which operated out of Okhla in Delhi, imports GPS equipment from Germany, has a plant in Mysore and is owned by Devang Shah.
Sobha Renaissance's corporate communications manager said he was new in the company and did not have a history of its tie-up with Sobha DSP at hand. A Sobha Developers spokesman said Sobha DSP and Sobha Renaissance are not arms of Sobha Developers.
Sobha Applied DSP is also supplying GPS equipment for autorickshaws, though it does not have a manufacturing licence for the fare meter. For autos, it has a tie-up with Pulsar Technologies, registered as a Bangalore company on the DIMTS website but sharing the same phone number as Sobha.
Use of data?
Sahai says the devices imported by Sobha are of good quality and underwent checks. The back-end of the data is taken care of by DIMTS for clusters and autos. Bus cluster owners, all private businessmen, are penalised based on this data for issues such as over-speeding or rash driving. This data, though, will need to be connected to police control rooms if it is to be used for ensuring safety of urban transport users. For instance, in the Nirbhaya Fund project, equipping public transport in 32 cities with GPS-based devices should translate into control rooms in each city from where police can respond to distress signals.
A Delhi Police spokesman said there were plans to connect control rooms with transport department back-ends that manage GPS information. He said he did not know at what stage these were, as another officer was liaising on all things related to women's security. That officer did not return texts or reply to messages left at his office.
