Government launches transport portal for seamless bus travel across India

The ministry of road transport and highways on Friday launched India's first integrated national road transport portal www.busindia.com, the largest online bus ticketing system in the world.

The new portal, which is on the lines of the integrated rail transport portal IRCTC, will address the need of a single window application, through which users can seamlessly plan their bus travel including stopovers, changing routes, multi-trips and round-trips across India.

Launching busindia.com, union minister for road transport Oscar Fernandes said, ''Now bus travel will become a whole new experience for people all over the country and even people outside India.

''This will go a long way and will set an example to several other initiatives that bear potential to implement online services in the G2C space,'' the minister added.

India has a vast middle class and the new portal puts India in a great spot of advantage globally as a nation, the minister said.

He said the IRCTC website has over 5.5 million hits per day with over 2 lakh unique visitors and over 1 lakh tickets booked. The number of bus users is at least six times more than the ones that use train services. This shows the depth and potential of connectivity bus services has in India, he added.

While the site itself is intuitive and easy to book online through  PCs and mobile devices, he said, and added plans are afoot for integrating busindia.com with IRCTC in the future wherein people can combine their train and bus journeys together and in the process travel far and wide in the country.

It will then be a very unique experience for everyone, the minister added.

The launch of busindia.com was made possible by the joint efforts of private sector Radiant Info and the Central Institute of Road Transport (CIRT). Radiant Info has helped in implementing online ticketing solutions to several state transport undertakings.