DTIDC to track its assets using barcodes

NEW DELHI: In a first, the Delhi Transport Infrastructure Development Corporation (DTIDC) — that looks after the three interstate bus terminals in the city — has started using a barcode system to map its moveable assets digitally.

Officials said the move has come in order to increase transparency and weed out any scope of corruption. The DTIDC has become the first body under the Delhi government to adopt the system.

The system has been launched across the three ISBTS — Kashmere Gate, Sarai Kale Khan and Anand Vihar — as well as the company headquarters, said officials. The company headquarters are located at Kashmere Gate.

According to Delhi government officials, barcode-based inventory management system has been introduced to help map the assets such as furniture, computers and other electronic items scattered across DTIDC compounds.

“The system will help ascertain the requirement of facilities being used by passengers visiting the ISBTS. Each of the three bus terminals at any given day cater to over 1,000 buses and a heavy footfall. While introducing the system, it was found that the corporation had no records of inventory in the manual system so thefts and pilferage would go unnoticed,” a senior official said.

It will also help create more accountability and keep a tab on the assets, which at times go missing, the official added.

The initiative may be expanded to other departments as well. So far bar-coding of inventory was mainly done by the private sector.

“In an organisation that has large number of moveable assets, a reliable inventory management system is essential. This will allow annual verification of assets, which was so far not possible in the manual system. Also, it will ensure marinating records and that there is no pilferage of items,” said managing director, DTIDC and special commissioner (transport) K K Dahiya.

So far all city government offices manually register inventory of items such as electronics and furniture. However, digital mapping allows timely repair and replacement, which otherwise keep stacking up, he said.

The digital mapping of assets has been introduced this year at the malkahanas (storage facility for case properties) at a number of police stations such as Sarita Vihar, Seemapuri, GTB Enclave and Shahdara among others.

This will further lead to a further fall in temperatures in northern and central India.

The night temperature could rise to around 9°C once the skies are overcast. “The cloudy sky will push up the night temperature… After the rains, Delhi could witness some fog as the moisture level would rise,” said the meteorologist cited above.

The coldest December night experienced in Delhi was on December 26, 1945, when the minimum temperature dropped to 1.1°C. In the last three years, however, the temperature hasn’t gone below 5°C in December.

The lowest recorded temperature in December in the past decade was on December 30, 2013, when the mercury dropped to 2.4°C.

Government agencies have also forecast that the air quality in the national capital would continue to stay in the very poor zone at least for the next three days because of slow winds and high relative humidity. On Saturday, the Air Quality Index (AQI) value of Delhi was 347, the sixth consecutive day the air has remained very poor.

“If there is some rain on Tuesday, we could expect some improvement in the air quality,” said a senior official at the Central Pollution Control Board. greements. Differentiation and climate finance are major sore points which will have to be resolved,” said Ravi Shankar Prasad, joint secretary in the Union environment ministry.

Environment secretary CK Mishra, who returned last week from the negotiations, said: “There is good momentum. We are not sure yet if the outcome will be optimum.”

Developed countries were to contribute an annual $100 million to developing nations to mitigate the effects of climate change under the Paris agreement.

Developed countries are not spending enough to mitigate the impact of climate change, the Indian ministry of finance submitted at COP24. In a paper titled ‘3 Essential “S”s of Climate Finance — Scope, Scale and Speed: A Reflection’ released on the sidelines of the conference, the ministry questioned climate finance values being reported by developed countries as having been transferred by them to developing countries.

The ministry quoted a recently released report of the standing committee on finance by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which assessed the total climate finance flows based on the biennial assessment reports of developed countries. The total climate-specific finance flows from Annex II Parties (which include the US, Australia and European Union) in 2016, according to this report, amounted to only around $ 38 billion which is less than 40% of the $100 billion target of climate finance.

“Progress (COP24) is very slow and a lot of things need to be agreed upon. Ministers meeting from next week would require discussions on a wide array of issues. These include equity, differentiation, forward looking finance, and flexibility in reporting would especially require a spirit of compromise to arrive at a consensus,” Vijeta Rattani of the climate change division at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said.

The negotiations will continue for another week until December 14. Ministers of the negotiating countries will meet next week to iron out the differences.

In the first week of the Katowice conference, scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) briefed delegates about the consequences of not meeting their climate goals and the urgency for enhancing the goals to prevent global warming of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

An IPCC report in October, titled ‘Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees’, warned that the Earth will face devastating consequences of climate change if the world fails to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius of preindustrial levels. The UN 1.5-de- gree report also warned that India will be one of the worst affected by heat stress resulting from climate change.

Crops, plantations, even livestock in 151 districts, or slightly more than one-fifth of the total districts in India, are susceptible to the impact of climate change, according to an annual review by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), a wing of the agriculture ministry.

“It is notable that the first week started off with the long shadow of IPCC which stressed the urgency of climate action. A few parties also called for 1.5 degrees to be the official goal of the Paris agreement. That said, there are still many issues like transparency for reporting on finance by developed countries, allowing for differentiation in many sections which are crucial and have to be addressed in the next week when the high-level segment begins,” said Aarti Khosla of Climate Trends, a research and communications organisation.

Climate scientists are hoping that negotiators take their warnings seriously.

“At the climate negotiations, it is always the case that nothing is agreed upon in the first week,” said NH Ravindranath, a climate scientist from Indian Institute of Science (IISC). “In the second week, towards the end, things start improving. In all paragraphs being negotiated on, there will be some bracketed parts that are later decided. Monitoring, reporting and verification of how countries are acting against climate change is among the many contentious issues. But I am hopeful that there will be something to look forward to at the end of next week.”