Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the ambitious National Common Mobility Card (NCMC) service for the Delhi Metro Airport Express Line on Monday. This latest inauguration is part of the Prime Minister’s ‘One Nation One Card’ initiative. NCMC can be used at all transit locations, making all new transit and subway payments interoperable via one card.
The idea for NCMC was brought up by the Nandan Nilekani committee created by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The five-member committee under Nilekani, the former chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIAI) has also proposed a number of measures, including all government payments to citizens via digital mode, to reduce the number of cash transactions in the country.
This is everything you need to know about NCMC:
1. NCMC will allow passengers with a RuPay debit card, issued in the last 18 months by 23 banks, including SBI, UCO Bank, Canara Bank, Punjab National Bank, etc., to drop in for Metro travel. “This facility will be available throughout the Delhi Metro network by 2022,” said a DMRC spokesperson.
2. NCMC is an automatic fee collection system. It will turn smartphones into an interoperable transport card that commuters can eventually use to pay for subway, bus, and suburban rail services.
3. The NCMC service is planned to cover the entire 400 km stretch of the Delhi Metro.
4. It will allow the entrance and exit of the Metro stations with the help of a smartphone, known as the automatic rate collection system (AFC). In the upcoming Phase IV Delhi Metro project, the AFC system will fully accept the NCMC, which can also be used in any city in the country.
5. To make the indigenous doors of the subway stations comply with the AFC, the government has contracted with Bharat Electronics Limited. Eventually, all Metro stations will be equipped with AFC gates.
6. The Nilekani committee had suggested that the NCMC should contain two instruments: a normal debit card that can be used at an ATM and a local wallet, which can be used for contactless payments, without the need to go back to the server or additional authentication. .
7. Banks mandated by the financial services department have been required to make their debit cards NCMC compliant, to ensure service availability.
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