Mumbai: BEST buses to introduce universal passes linked with CoWin app for fully vaccinated passengers

Soon BEST will start rolling out a Universal Pass for the passengers to travel in buses, following the Indian Railways that have linked the railway UTS App with CoWin for ease in travel inside local trains.

Following the Maharashtra government's diktat of allowing only fully vaccinated people to travel in modes of public transport including BEST, the Undertaking shall make arrangements of linking their Chalo App with CoWIN so that people can upload their double vaccination certificate and travel at ease.

This would mean that fully vaccinated passengers can update their certificates on this App and buy tickets rather than carrying it and/or displaying it every time to the conductor before boarding.

The decision comes at a time when on January 10, the BEST administration asked their conductors to verify the double vaccine certificates from passengers and gave liberty to the bus drivers to ask passengers to alight if Covid appropriate behaviour was not followed by any of the passengers while in transit.

Confirming the same, Lokesh Chandra, General Manager, BEST Undertaking said: “We are working out on a system similar to the one available on Mumbai’s suburban trains wherein passengers travelling in our buses can link the Chalo App with their fully vaccinated certificates. This will enable people to travel seamlessly after buying a paperless ticket and double vaccine certificate on our Chalo App”.

This would ideally mean that there would be a Universal Pass like system for BEST bus passengers as well.

This step will certainly bring relief to people as the BEST Undertaking. It will weed out those who are not fully vaccinated by checking their certificates. The BEST officials claim that a large number of Mumbaikars have already taken double vaccination and so they might migrate to Chalo App faster.

“More than 3 lakh people have already downloaded the Chalo App,” added Chandra. "There are already 46-48 lakh people travelling on a daily average, in local trains on Central and Western Railways. At present, around 27-28 lakh people are using the BEST buses to commute every day," he said.