Indian Railways to use NXP’s contactless smart ticketing
17 August, 2009
category: Contactless, Transit
Indian Railways, which carries 18 million passengers a day, making it one of the world’s largest rail transit systems, has selected NXP Semiconductor’s chip technology to drive its contactless smart cards for the automation fare collection system to be rolled out initially across five Indian cities.
The company says its MIFARE DESFire chip has been selected by the Centre for Railway Information Systems, an IT organization under the Ministry of Railways. The contactless transit card project will first focus on New Delhi, Secunderabad, Kolkata, Bhubaneswar and Pune.
Together with card and inlay-manufacturer Siepmann’s Card Systems, NXP will provide the MIFARE DESFire chips over a period of one year. This project is expected to go live in September. The adoption of contactless ticketing is expected to greatly reduce lines at manual ticketing counters.