Rajahmundry: The state government has come up with a pilot project on GPS-based ‘Boat Tracking System’ to keep track of boats sailing in sea for fishing, especially during storms to ensure safety to fishermen. The pilot project has been initiated in Guntur, East Godavari and Visakhapatnam districts. Hyderabad-based Volty IT Solutions Private Limited is taking up the project and has developed a software application called ‘Transync’, which works on smart phones with internet access having android as their operating system. The GPS device will be fixed to the mechanised boats. Details pertaining to the registration number of the boat, its licence number, details of boat driver and others will be fed to the software application.
The software application is also available on Google’s Play Store. Once the boat ventures into the sea for fishing with the fishermen, district officials on the shore can keep track of its location in the sea by its latitude and longitude. The GPS device is also fitted with an alarm. In case the boat goes beyond the set limit like 30 km or 40 km from the shore and enters into the international water, the alarm starts ringing giving indication to the boat driver that their boat is entering into international water and that they should return to Indian waters to avoid trouble.
This alarm facility has been incorporated mainly to help the fishermen to confine their fishing activity in the Indian waters as a series of reports come in very frequently that when Indian fishermen venture into international waters, they were caught by the Sri Lankan forces and vice versa. The select boats and boat landing centres have been geo-tagged and it helps to find out as to which boats have entered into the sea and from which landing centre. The software application can be used by the authorised persons as they are given User ID and password. The fisheries authorities said earlier, the fishermen used to avail the services of Very High Frequency sets to communicate with the people on the shore to inform about their location in the sea. Over a period of time, the fishermen began carrying mobile phones into the sea.
