The local bus company will soon be monitoring all aspects of their vehicles from the sky, using Global Positioning System (GPS).

The managing director of Seychelles Public Transport Corporation (SPTC), Mr Daniel Gappy, said on Monday October 13,  when he told Nation that the project will begin with the organisation's 20 buses on Praslin.

"From our offices on Mahe, we will be able to tell how much fuel there is on a particular bus, how many passengers have boarded at a given point and how many have disembarked, and how much money the driver has collected," Mr Gappy said. He was outlining the new measures that SPTC hopes to put in place soon to reduce abuse, increase efficiency and eliminate fraud. He was talking after the weekend announcement by Vice-President James Michel that the corporation had completed its investigations into the case where 21 drivers and three other SPTC staff members had been implicated in the loss of R800,000.

Regarding the case, the director said that drivers were normally expected to take the computer modules from their automatic ticketing machines to the cashiers who read off the amount of revenue the driver had collected, whereupon they pay.

"But what the 21 did in or before June this year, was that they took the modules to a scheduling clerk who erased the amount of money the computer showed had been collected," he said, but added that when they called in an expert from South Africa, he was able to immediately "crack" the case by checking on the computers' "activities" records.

He said SPTC had started the process of recovering the money through their lawyer from the 24, all of whose services have been terminated.

"The police are also still conducting their own investigations and it is expected they will separately charge the sacked workers for their fraud," he said.

13 of the drivers in fact confessed that they had been involved in fraud, according to Mr Gappy.

On the GPS monitoring, the director said if the project proved successful on Praslin, it would be introduced on the corporation's 180 buses on Mahe.

"It will also help schedule the buses better," he said, giving as an example a situation where several buses would be "batched" together.

"Since we will know the number of passengers on board each vehicle, we should be able to tell a driver to transfer, say his only eight passengers, to a nearby bus and commence operations on another schedule," Mr Gappy said.

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