by THO
Across India, city residents who travel by public transport all share a common trepidation — whether the bus they want to catch has already left the bus stop. This anxiety comes from a lack of infrastructure in place to track the movement of buses on city streets, making the commute unreliable and unattractive.
However, with the intelligent transport management system (ITMS) being made an integral part of the PM-E bus Sewa scheme, urban mobility experts in India are hopeful that the technique will set a positive trend in laying a technological backbone for bus services from the planning stage itself, rather than an afterthought.
ITMS can be loosely defined as a set of integrated information technology systems to track the real-time location of buses — providing real-time updates to passengers and operators about bus arrivals and departures, collating ticketing information electronically, and ensuring the efficient management of vehicle maintenance, driver schedules, and operational logistics, among other facilities.
Currently, buses as a means of public transport are largely used only by captive users due to underfunding and policy oblivion over the past decade and more. On the other hand, during the same period, Metro systems have dominated the discussion around urban mobility in India. With unprecedented funding, the Metro rail network in India is poised to become the second largest in the world only after China.
However, with the anticipation of a larger and wider e-bus scheme by the central government and the focus back on buses even at the state governments’ level, experts are advocating for a standard and scalable approach to deploy these IT systems.
Problem of interoperability
In absence of set standards, state government-owned entities that mostly hold monopolies in the sector have failed to maintain and scale these IT functions.
Avinash Dubedi, programme head of integrated transport at WRI India, said that often, due to the lack of integrated real-time digital information, non-daily commuters are uninformed of changes in schedules that are made periodically.
He explained that following a tendering system, on many occasions, bus tracking systems are installed, but even within the tender period scaling the same solution is often unsuccessful.
“Even though few public transit authorities (PTAs) were using electronic ticketing machines, the data could not be accessed by them but the vendor alone, and PTAs could not study user behaviour to tweak its services to greater efficiency,” he said.
Like this, Dubedi said, around ₹1,000 crore has been spent across India over the last decade on many such solutions, but the lack of standards meant there was no scalability and interoperability. “So, there is no significant increase in efficiency of services or reliability for commuters.”
Amit Bhatt, managing director (India) at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), said that currently, most urban bus systems in India do not provide reliability, convenience and cost-effectiveness at the same time, but with the right application of technology, the experience of public buses can come close to that of Metros.
Promoting public transportation
Experts believe that using these IT-enabled systems can help a long way in shifting some private vehicle users to buses as services get more reliable. In the process, the transport sector can be decarbonised in line with net zero goals and decongest Indian cities.
A successful demonstration of such solutions spread across eight cities was monitored by the Centre’s Transport4all challenge, part of the Smart City Mission. One proposal for automated staff deployment by the start-up Cargo FL resulted in the improvement of on-time performance of 176 buses in Belagavi, Karnataka from 25% to 66%.
Earlier, every morning, the depot manager would assign staff for every bus on pen and paper. So, it used to be very hard to assess and manage the data of their attendance and performance at the end of the month.
“By digitising and monitoring the staff schedules, the system can accurately identify and categorise staff schedules for example as extra, on-time, and delayed. The elimination of paper usage not only reduces manual errors but also speeds up the entire scheduling process. The daily duty allocation time at the depot has been drastically reduced from 840 minutes to just 120 minutes, marking an 85% improvement in efficiency,” explained Vaishali Singh, programme manager, ITDP India, which was the knowledge partner for Transport4All project.
Similarly, in Pune, a passenger information and ticketing app developed by Anamar Technologies sold 200,000 tickets and passes within 15 days of its launch.
According to a spokesperson for private tech solution provider Chalo, around a million people use their app across 50 Indian cities, including around 500,000 in Mumbai alone.
“Digitisation of payments in buses which can curb a lot of revenue leakage and also aid customer convenience,” he said.
To address the scalability and interoperability challenges in these solutions, the WRI India team, in collaboration with the Foundation for Interoperability in Digital Economy (FIDE), recently published a working paper titled Open E-Bus Blueprint, which explored leveraging digital public infrastructure (DPI) — a framework that powers public goods like UPI—for bus systems in India. The authors asserted that once this blueprint is developed and adopted, market forces will create scalable and rapidly deployable solutions using open-source data tailored to diverse audiences, much like what has been achieved in the digital payments space.
The PTA Transport for London has made its data available for not only its buses but also for taxis, trains, and metro since 2017. According to a Deloitte study, the open data policy generates annual economic benefits and savings of up to £130 million, supporting 500 jobs.
In the global south, Bagota in Colombia also follows an open data policy and has implemented Sistema Integrado de Información sobre Movilidad Urbano Regional (SIMUR), which among other services, provides real-time updates through a dedicated portal and mobile app.
Officials of MoHUA and MHI could not be reached for a comment.
