National Common Mobility Card | 05 Mar 2019

Recently the Prime Minister has launched the indigenously-developed National Common Mobility Card (NCMC) to enable people to pay multiple kinds of transport charges, including metro services and toll tax, across the country.

  • Dubbed as 'One Nation One Card', the inter-operable transport card would allow the holders to pay for their bus travel, toll taxes, parking charges, retail shopping and even withdraw money.
  • In December, 2018 the Delhi government had also launched a common mobility card for travelling in Metro trains, Delhi Transport Corporation, and cluster buses. These cards, however, cannot be used for paying parking fees, at toll booths in the Capital, or for retail.

Features

  • This is India’s First Indigenously Developed Payment Eco-system for transport and consists of NCMC Card, SWEEKAR (Swachalit Kiraya: Automatic Fare Collection System) and SWAGAT (Swachalit Gate- a gate and card-reader system) which is based on NCMC Standards.
    • The three together will enable the use of the national mobility card across the country without a conflict with existing point-of-sale (PoS) machines.
  • The cards can be issued by all public and private banks the same way credit, debit, and prepaid cards are issued.
  • The Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs brought to the fore the National Common Mobility Card (NCMC) to enable seamless travel by different metros and other transport systems across the country besides retail shopping and purchases.

Background

  • To ensure a seamless travel across metros and other transport systems in addition to retail shopping and purchases, the Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs (MoHUA) came out with the National Common Mobility Card (NCMC) Program.
  • The Union Ministry of Urban Affairs have been working on it since 2006, when it was envisaged as part of the National Urban Transport Policy (NUTP).
    • The Ministry formed a committee in 2014 with representatives from National Informatics Centre (NIC), Centre for Development of Advance Computing (C-DAC), Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) and the Ministry of finance to develop the NCFC ecosystem.
    • NPCI was given the mandate to develop the specifications for card & terminal to support the NCMC ecosystem.
    • CDAC was entrusted the task of finalization of NCMC specification for AFC system including the interface with Bank server. CDAC worked in collaboration with NPCI to complete this activity.
    • Thereafter, Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) was roped in for making Gates & Reader.
  • This is the first gate and the reader which has been manufactured by an Indian company. This is also the first indigenous payment reader which has been certified as per International standards.
  • With this, India joins the very few elite nations who have indigenous capacity on gate and reader production.

Benefits

  • This will help in higher digital payments penetration, savings on closed loop card lifecycle management cost and reduced operating cost. The rich data insights may be used by operators for business intelligence leading to efficient operation.
  • NCMC Ecosystem will further help government in digitization of low value payments and reduced cost for the entire ecosystem.