Responding to complaints of poor functioning of its Gurugaman mobile application, the Gurugram Metropolitan City Bus Ltd (GMCBL), on Friday, held a review meeting to identify issues regarding the application’s performance. Sonal Goel, CEO, GMCBL, instructed officials to suggest remedial measures and submit a timeline for their implementation within a week.
Developed by the Delhi Integrated Multimodal Transit System (DIMTS), the Gurugaman application has been receiving unfavourable reviews from its users ever since it was launched in July 2019. It was designed to provide travellers with key information, which could help in their commute, such as weather status, pollution index, occupancy display, route details and suchlike. The application also displays information about the operation of Delhi Metro’s Yellow line for intercity travellers and that of the Rapid Metro for intracity travellers. It also helps commuters track the locations of individual buses — an important function in which it has been performing poorly for the past few weeks.
Sandip Gupta, a citizen who uses the application frequently, said, “The application loads very slowly. The occupancy information provided is often incorrect. Even the arrival and the departure times of individual buses are not correct. As such, I often have to wait for long durations. The application used to function quite smoothly when it was first launched. However, now it has become unreliable.”
“The primary complaint we have been getting is that the application does not track the GPS location of the buses,” said Vanita Akhauri, spokesperson, GMCBL. “It’s a technical glitch. We are taking help from the DIMTS, GMDA’s IT and GIS mapping departments to resolve it,” she added.
The meeting on Friday also discussed the growing demand of commuters to allow them to link the application to their e-wallets. This would enable commuters to buy bus tickets and to recharge their smart cards online. “We are discussing the matter of online recharge. The matter is in the pipeline. The concessionaire in charge of providing the cards has been told to submit a proposal for the same,” said Akhauri. Presently, there are about five or six physical locations across the city, such as Huda City Centre, Rajeev Chowk and IFFCO Chowk Metro station, where people can physically recharge their smart cards.
A DIMTS official privy to the matter, seeking anonymity, said, “There is no fault in the application’s development. These issues are due to other factors. For example, there can be a lack of transmission between a particular bus and the application. We are working to fix the issues at the earliest.”