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1 Nov, 2013

India Launches Portal for Booking Nationwide Bus Travel

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Ministry of Road Transport & Highways, 31-October, 2013 – Mr. Oscar Fernandes, Minister of Road Transport & Highways launched India’s first integrated National Transport Portal “www.busindia.com” here today.

Speaking on the occasion Mr. Fernandes said busindia.com will address the need of a single window application, like IRCTC, through which users can seamlessly plan their bus travel including stop overs, changing routes, multi-trips and round-trips. They can pay by credit cards and even book hotels. He said with this launch that busindia.com now becomes the largest online bus ticketing system in the world. Now bus travel will become a whole new experience for people all over the country and even people outside India, he added. 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.

The Minister stated that India is a land of a vast middle class and this puts India in a great spot of advantage globally progressing as a nation. In India trains are widely used and the IRCTC website has over 5.5 million hits per day with over 200,000 unique visitors and over 100,000 tickets booked, he said. The number of bus users is at least six times more in number than the ones that use train services. This shows the depth and potential of connectivity bus services has in India.

While the site itself is intuitive and easy to book on a PC and even a mobile device, Road Transport Ministry is constantly working towards making travel in India more pleasurable and more integrated for commuters. There are plans of 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.

Congratulating everyone involved in this process. Mr. Fernandes hoped for more such initiatives and innovations that keep Transport Sector ahead of others, effective and efficient. The Minister commended the efforts of Radiant Info and Central Institute of Road Transport (CIRT) in identifying gap and addressing it with the launch of busindia.com. Radiant Info is a name in the Transport sector with credentials and success in implementing online ticketing solutions to several of State Transport Units is well known and their effort in this area is.