The Hindu : When truckin' meets telecom

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Apr 07, 2003

Business

Business

When truckin' meets telecom

The availability of digital maps or a national wireless network may be patchy but the sheer size of the Indian vehicles market dictates that transportation telematics is a techno-commercial opportunity whose time has come.

FIVE HUNDRED buses of the Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation(APSRTC) are being progressively fitted with automated fuel management systems, supplied by Triad Fleet Control, a joint venture of the A. P. Government and the Israel-based Roseman Engineering. If the experiment provides the expected fuel savings, the system will be extended to thecorporation's entire 18,000-strong fleet.

Across the border, in Karnataka, the KSRTC has ordered 50 units of `M-Trak', a driver compliance system that allows the management to track the bus, mapping its route, logging the halts and alerting it in case of unauthorised deviations. The product created by MobiApps, a Bangalore, U.S. and Singapore-based company fuelled by Indian brains, is capable of online tracking using the twin options of GSM cellular phones or the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system, but the Karnataka transport operation is being met by a cheaper offline data logging route. MobiApps is implementing a GPS/GSM based solution for 118 trucks of the major trucking company, Transport Corporation of India (TCI).

An online satellite-based route is also being tried out in Kerala where four of the state transport corporation's newly acquired Volvo buses are to be fitted with telematic tracking units.

Telematics — the marriage of telecom and informatics — caters to a new and emerging market for the collection, logging and transmission of performance information across a wide spectrum of industries. While applications like process plant monitoring are well established, a new telematics niche is coming up in the surface transportation sector. And while the key enablers — a smooth and nationwide wireless telecom infrastructure and a large data base of digitised cartographic information — are as yet only patchily available in India, the sheer size of the market (3.3 million km of roads; 3 million trucks on the road; 1.2 million passenger buses; 1.5 lakh new commercial vehicles added every year) suggests that the key question about transportation telematics technology is not `if' but `when and how soon.' Which is why "Tele Trans 2003,'' last month's conference in Bangalore — the first in this country — on Telematics in Transportation, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry's Institute of Quality, drew participation from a phalanx of big name national and international players. Vehicle makers such as Kinetic Engineering, Ashok Leyland Ford, Toyota-Kirloskar, Volvo, General Motors and Daimler Chrysler; ancillary makers and telematics solution providers such as Delphi, TVS Clayton, Siemens, Tata Elxsi and MobiApp; IT players such as Wipro, Kshema Technologies and Hewlett-Packard; industry analysts like Frost & Sullivan and Ernst & Young; transport undertakings such as Karnataka's KSRTC as well as government level participants such as Britain's Department of Trade and Industry and academic experts like the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT).

There was general agreement that transportation telematics today would encompass the following applications:

Security: Collision alarm; theft alert; vehicle movement tracking.

Safety: weather alert; hazard warnings; emergency assistance; Crash protection and notification.

Productivity: dynamic routing; trip assignment; fuel efficiency.

Navigation: cruise control; online map assistance; optimal routing; automated toll collection.

Vehicle management: service routines; performance/ system health monitoring.

Unlike the West, where private cars on the road formed a significant proportion of the telematics market and rear seat `infotainment' was a significant market, the luxury car sector formed a small fraction of the Indian vehicle market; so this was not a worthwhile niche at present.

Then two main enablers that needed to be in place before telematics could take off here: a nation-wide communication network and availability of digitised map information were admittedly less than perfect here. With the cellular phone base now hovering around ten million, the Global Services Mobile (GSM) route chose itself as the most cost effective solution in India to provide a wireless umbilical to vehicles on the move. Yet many agreed that the current level of ubiquity was inadequate — large swaths of the major national and State highways were currently `blind' zones. The alternative was to exploit the available GPS satellite coverage where the cost was largely in the transceiver hardware — now $100 buys a small GPS set. Taxes and duties in India add another 65 per cent to the landed cost — which is why the GPS route has not yet emerged in a big way. And R. Natarajan, head of Tata Elxsi's Thiruvananthapuram-based Design Develop- ment Centre (possibly because of his earlier experience with the Indian Space Programme) made the point while talking to this correspondent, that in the long term India needed, indeed was quite capable of allocating the 2-3 polar orbiting satellites required, to create its own positioning system, one that could not be `switched off' by a foreign owner in the event of any geopolitical crisis.

A number of Indian players had emerged in the Geeographic Information System (GIS) business, with the expertise to marry cartography and computer; what prevented car navigation systems from taking off here, was the concentration of the car business in the small and medium sector. An owner who spent Rs. 3-4 lakhs on a car was not likely to go in for a navigation system costing half a lakh or a "digital dashboard'' for a lot more. Stick our head out and ask for directions: that was still a viable solution.

Hence the largest techno-commercial opportunity seemed to centre on state-owned transport undertakings and the large private truckers.

To them the savings by way of reduced fuel offered by telematics-backed routing and fleet control provided an increasingly unanswerable logic for going high tech.

MobiApps' CEO Sanjay Chakrabarty estimated the market potential in India for transport telematics at Rs. 77.5 crores, by 2005, divided almost equally between hardware and services, a huge jump from current volumes that hovered around Rs. 2 crores.

Asoke Talukder who occupies the Daimler Chrysler Chair at Bangalore's IIIT, reminded the audience that there were compelling socio economic justifiers as well: the need for mobile healthcare in the vast rural hinterland'; the scopefor vehicle mounted intensive care units; the possibilities of patient status telemetry.

But whether the motivation was philanthropy or commercial savvy, he pointed out that a solution to fit every need was available right here and now. He highlighted the work of a local outfit, Zybertrack which already provided a complete vehicle monitoring solution.

It was not alone. At the cutting edge of automobiles and automated data exchange, could be found dozens of players, Indian and international who were saying to the nation's drivers: let us help you to help yourself to as moother, safer, more profitable drive.

Anand Parthasarathy

in Bangalore

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