www.busindia.com

The airlines in the country have taken to it and the Indian Railways has started reaping rich dividends from this. But e-ticketing has so far bypassed the massive state road transport network in the country that plies 1,15,362 buses and carries 6.12 crore passengers every day across the country generating annual revenue of Rs 22,800.48 crore. An effort is being made for the first time to put these seats on buses of State Road Transport Corporations on to a portal www.busindia.com to offer bus reservations online within India. This ambitions project that will provide e-ticketing on bus routes will be launched in the first week of December 2008 and this could turn out to the largest such reservation system for bus transport anywhere in the world, director of Central Institute of Road Transport R Balasubramanian spearheading this project said.Some private bus operators in the country have experimented with this but not with this scale and size as far as routes and passengers go. According to Balasubramanian, so far state transport undertakings of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Harayana, Punjab, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Uttar Pradesh, Chandigarh and Himachal Pradesh have joined in while Rajasthan, West Bengal and Assam will be joining in soon.Maharashtra’s SRTC has opted to go on its own but could link to the portal. The project is being executed on a BOOT basis with Radiant Info Systems Bangalore that is providing the online reservation systems. Radiant, CIRT and the State Transport company will have a revenue sharing agreement for every ticket sold online. Radiant has already implemented some of this system in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu but now this is all to be brought under one portal with CIRT as the nodal agency for all the STUs that will facilitate consolidation of the routes, seats, fares and monitor it. This is estimated to be a Rs 70 crore to Rs 80 crore project. This way the STUs will not have to make any capital investment on their own and can benefit from the revenue gains, says Balasubramanian. Further, this portal could be linked to hotel reservation systems, travel companies and other service providers apart from being a good advertising medium,he adds.
If this can be pulled off,then it could be a saviour for the troubled transport undertaking reeling under massive losses.“Their financial viability are under threat due to rising operation costs. STUs need to venture innovative means and methods to control cost. One man operation and electronic fare collection system are some of the innovative measures to be adopted by STUs,” suggests a latest CIRT report on the State Transport Undertakings, Profile& Performance.
There are 23 State Road Transport Corporations 10 Municipal Transport Undertakings, 8 run by government departments and 11 government companies in public transport space.These together own 1,15,362 buses and generated total revenue of Rs 22,800.48 crore.
A fraction of this is a few hundred crore a year and this could be a blessing for the struggling STUs.