India's financial capital and home to the biggest film industry on the planet Bollywood, Mumbai is also the most reliant on its public transport services. Travelling by the bus service usually involves struggling for a place to stand, then trying to look for change in your pocket with one hand while the other one holds the overhead railings. A solution has been implemented in the form of 'GO' card, it's a smart card that deducts the exact fare in two ways.

• The walk-in walk out
In this method a passenger aligning waves his smart card as he enters throught the back & when he exits from the front at two units placed at both ends. The passenger is charged as he exits. Which makes me wonder what happens if a person forgets to place the card as he exits? Forty buses are equipped in this way

• Portable deducter
The other method is when the bus conductor deducts the fare by placing a passengers card on a portable mobile sized unit. The remaining 3500 buses use this method.

Riders can purchase Go Mumbai cards from 120 point of sale-and-refill PCs across Mumbai city at BEST's bus depots and smaller outposts. These PCs run CentOS, a distribution compiled from the free packages used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. From the point of sale terminals, the fare collections are digitally transferred to individual float accounts on back office servers running Sun's Solaris operating system. When the rider uses the card, the float accounts are debited accordingly. The system handles transactions daily worth Indian rupees (INR) 2.5 to 3 million citywide. Deployed in January 2007, the system is so stable that it will this month be officially extended to part of Mumbai's suburban railways as well. It is also secure, and has had no hacks and cracks, according to Kaizen.

Thanks to the system's use of Linux, BEST saved about INR 1.2 million on the point of sale infrastructure alone, as compared with a Microsoft Windows setup, Goriani says. BEST paid nothing for the rest of the system, signing instead a revenue-sharing contract with Kaizen. This goes in the same books of anti-Microsoft as happened recently with many schools in India opting for linux.

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