Vehicles stranded at Alipiri toll gate

Newly introduced online bar coding system fails to issue tokens

Tirupati : Traffic came to a standstill as hundreds of vehicles stranded at Alipiri toll gate on Friday as a technical snag has rendered the newly introduced online bar coding system defunct. Even after several attempts to rectify the problem proved futile. So, on the directive of vigilance and security officer Hanumanthu the computer operators and security personnel issued manual tokens to clear the traffic jam.

It may be noted that the TTD has introduced bar coding system to control the speed of the vehicles at both the entry points on Tirumala-Tirupati ghat road stretch. All vehicles have to take bar code tokens before entering the ghat road and to hand over a copy of this token at the other point.

With these tokens, the computers will analyse the duration of journey and will block the registration numbers of those vehicles which violated the guidelines of TTD. This system was in use for the past three days, but due to a technical snag this new system failed to function. The software experts at Electronic Data Processing Unit in TTD's administrative building made several attempts to rectify the problem, but all such efforts went in vain for more than two hours.

Meanwhile, Vigilance and Security Officer Hanumanthu rushed to the spot and directed the security staff to clear the traffic jam by issuing manual tokens. As the vehicles were stopped for more than 15 minutes at toll gate, several passengers alighted from their vehicles and relaxed by sitting on platforms and other side of the road.

The EDP experts tried to bring the old system into functioning, but withdrew such efforts due to technical problems. It may be noted that for every 10 seconds one vehicle was passing through Alipiri toll gate on an average to Tirumala. The influx of pilgrims will be more from Friday to Sunday and the vehicle number may cross 8,000 mark per day.