Cardz Middle East spearheads Mifare bus passes for students in Karnataka
27 June, 2008
category: Contactless, Education, Transit
Cardz Middle East, a United Arab Emirates card management solutions provider specializing in digital photo ID card management systems, is launching a Mifare-based bus pass system that’s initially targeted to students in the Indian state of Karnataka.
Prior to the new system, students would identify themselves with their school or college identity card and be given concession tickets via a manual ticketing system. With the Mifare system, a personalized card will be given to each student. When the card is brought within range of the electronic ticketing machine , a bus pass is automatically generated.
“This is an important project for Cardz Me, and we’re excited to be tackling something on this scale,” says Nitin Shabbir, managing director of Cardz Middle East. “We are integrating DigiOn24 Mifare encoders with Nisca PR5350 high-speed printers, to provide smooth automation and printing.”
The Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation, a large service-oriented public-sector undertaking that owns 6,000 vehicles and carries 250,000 passengers every day, opted for a Mifare system to increase accountability and speed up the process of dispensing secured bus passes. The bus pass system uses Mifare 1k cards and a fully colored card personalization with encoding takes only 30 seconds to print.
Cardz Middle East has partnered with Radiant Info Tech to implement the Mifare system at ten different locations in Karnatka state with the facility for data entry and printing provided by Card Tech India Ltd, Bangalore. They are also partnering with Team Nisca, makers of identification card printers, and DigiOn24, RFID experts and encoder manufacturers, to provide a custom solution within the given budget.
While students will be the first users of the system, Mifare will be gradually expanded to the general public, with a target of half a million card personalizations a year.
Cardz Middle East has developed a custom software system to print and encode the cards, connecting it with an Oracle database. Depending upon the student’s requirements, passes will be issued on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis.