India Resumes Development of National Prepaid Transit Card (Sept. 2, 2015)
New Delhi’s Urban Development Ministry this week announced it’s reached an agreement for a consortium of agencies to begin developing an interoperable payment card with a prepaid feature for POS purchases and public transportation that eventually could be used with different transit systems across India. The ministry has created a Smart National Common Mobility Card model, with the goal of creating an open-loop, EMV payment card that can support credit, debit and stored value for use in all regions across the nation.
Development is set to begin immediately, under the direction of Urban Development Minister M. Vankaiah Naidu, who first discussed the plan in 2011. Naidu established a committee that included members of the National Informatics Centre, the Centre for Development of Advance Computing, the Bureau of Indian Standards, the Ministry of Finance and the National Payment Corp. of India. After studying different models used globally, the ministry settled on the smart card model, noting that the only similar card is in Singapore, where interoperability between transit systems is confined to within the city. The ministry directed the National Payments Corp. to oversee development, creating a support base of vendors for providing certified tools, cards, terminals and related services with a focus on using Indian suppliers.
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