Metro rail passengers from now on will be able to recharge their passes online through facilities introduced on Tuesday.
The new online facility will allow them to recharge their Rapid Passes and MRT Passes using their credit cards issued by any bank and mobile financial service platforms, including Bkash, Nagad and Rocket.
Shortly after the inauguration of the new facility, however, the system server went down as many rushed to access it in the afternoon, officials concerned said, adding that it would take one or two days to make the server properly functional.
Passengers will be able to recharge their cards with minimum Tk 100 and maximum Tk 5,000 from anywhere anytime.
To complete the process, after recharging, the cards need to touch any 鈥榓dd-value machine鈥� set up at the metro stations.
Authorities have installed 32 add-value machines at 16 stations, two at each station, on the 20.1-kilometre-long MRT Line-6 on Uttara-Motijheel route.
Officials said that more such machines would be installed gradually.
An app would also be launched next month for recharge of metro rail passes.
The online recharge system was inaugurated by Sheik Moinuddin, special assistant to the chief adviser and attached to the road transport and bridges ministry, at a ceremony at Agargaon metro station on Tuesday morning.
The ceremony was organised by Dhaka Transport Coordination Authority, the implementing agency for the online recharge system.
DTCA executive director Neelima Akhter said that after the inauguration about 1.5 lakh cards were being registered for recharge and some 800 cards were recharged within few hours.
The excessive pressure of visitors sent the server down, she said, adding that they took immediate step to increase its capacity to allow more registrations per day.
鈥業t would take one of two more days to increase the server鈥檚 capacity,鈥� said the DTCA executive director.
The chief adviser鈥檚 special assistant Sheik Moinuddin said that the government was trying to complete the entire recharge process on smartphones in its next step.
鈥楪etting down from the metro train if one needs to take a bus, passengers will be able to use the card to pay their bus fare too,鈥� he said.
Passengers can already pay fares using the Rapid Passes and MRT Passes when they use the circular bus and water bus services at Hatirjheel and BRTC city service buses in the capital, Sheik Moinuddin added.
The main vision of the interim government was to ease passengers鈥� suffering, saving their time and labour wasted in the long queues.
The special assistant added that this step would be considered as a significant advancement in digital transformation of the country鈥檚 public transport system.
Neelima Akhter in her chair鈥檚 remarks said that the system would make the metro services easier, safer and modern.
Special guest additional secretary at Road Transport and Highways Division Nikhil Kumar Das said that use of digital technology in operating public transport would help ensure good governance and improve passenger service quality.
The ceremony was attended, among others, by Dhaka Mass Rapid Transit Company Limited director AKM Khairul Alam, Bangladesh Bank director Md Sharafat Ullah Khan, Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation chairman Abdul Latif Mollah and SSL Commerce managing director Saiful Islam.
For recharging the cards, users are asked to register cards in the website or app (ww.rapidpass.com.bd) at first.
After touching the cards to the add-value machine, AVM in short, a message (SMS) will come to the registered mobile number.聽
Without completing one recharge, new recharge cannot be done. To cancel any recharge the user will have to pay 5 per cent service charge.
