THE Ministry of Education has announced three major changes to the blue e-ticketing transport cards for school students.
In a press conference yesterday, permanent secretary for the Ministry of Education Alison Burchell said these changes had been finalised after a review process with various stakeholders.
“With effect from November 23, the remaining balance on the blue e-ticketing transport cards will only be available for use from January 13, 2020,” Ms Burchell said.
“Students who are using these blue cards, we are urging for them to get their supplementary red-yellow cards for travelling during the school holidays.
“Topping up will not be available currently with effect from November 23 on the blue cards.”
She said from term one of school next year, there would be restrictions placed on the blue cards for students.
“So the cards will be operational between 6.30am to 9am in the mornings and then from 2.30pm to 5pm on weekdays.”
She said some reasons why they were doing this were not a secret.
“The Attorney-General, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, in the budget speech, alluded to them in terms of an amount of fraud that has been noted in the use of blue cards by people who are not eligible to use them.
“We have also identified that it helps to support truancy in terms of students being able to go to school effectively on a subsidised blue card at any time of the day. So we trying to make sure we restrict this as well.”
She said there had been several cards that had been confiscated by the Land Transport Authority (LTA) which was found to be abused.
“In 2019, a minimum of 143 cards have been confiscated. This is all part for us making sure we are using taxpayers’ money responsibly.
She revealed that the average transaction on a Sunday was $33,000 currently for blue cards and on a weekday amounted to $65,000.
She said the average value of transactions happening after 5pm on a weekday was at least $3000.
She added another change that would come into effect would be that there would be only one tap allowed every 15 minutes because this also had been abused where students or other users of the blue cards were tapping frequently.
