According to reports from The Economic Times, Ebix and its distribution arm Ebix Payment Services, along with National Securities Depository Limited (NDSL) payment banks, have registered more than one crore NCMC RuPay smartcards in five months. This represents a pace of approximately 66,000 cards per day, or about 46 cards every minute, sustained without interruption. The achievement ranks among the fastest issuance runs recorded by a financial institution on the RuPay network in India. What makes this achievement particularly significant is that it marks the first time anywhere in the country that state transport corporation's concessional passengers — students, senior citizens, persons with disabilities, freedom fighters and other notified categories — are travelling on National Common Mobility Cards. For decades, concession travel in Maharashtra ran on a paper pass handed to the conductor at the door and checked against a photograph that had usually faded, making verification difficult and leaving the state reconciling a large annual subsidy mostly by hand.
As reported by The Economic Times, the smartcards now serve MSRTC concessional passengers across Maharashtra's 16,000 villages. The cards were issued in partnership with NSDL Payments Bank and are in daily use across the Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation (MSRTC) network. The initiative covers students, senior citizens, persons with disabilities, freedom fighters and other notified categories, with issuance following the network rather than concentrating in major cities like Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur. This approach made the rollout particularly challenging, as it involved enrolling beneficiaries scattered across every taluka in a state, verifying entitlement category by category, and doing it in places where the nearest bank branch may be an hour away. The MSRTC's network reaches roughly 16,000 villages, and issuance was run through MSRTC's depot network so that passengers could enrol where they already travel from, rather than being asked to reach a bank or a district office.
According to The Economic Times, EbixCash Payment Solutions, which operates regulated Reserve Bank of India entities holding AD-II, Full Fledged Money Changer (FFMC), Money Transfer Service Scheme (MTSS) and Prepaid Payment Instrument (PPI) licenses, ran the end-to-end chain including card personalisation, issuance, fare collection, transaction processing and concession validation. The system verifies category, validity and concession slab at the machine offline at the moment of boarding, with concession travel reimbursed by the state through an auditable record system. On the NCMC card, the concession entitlement is stored on the chip, and the ticketing machine validates it offline in under a second, which matters on routes where a bus halts for barely thirty seconds. Card programmes of this size ordinarily take well over a year, and this achievement represents almost none of them involve enrolling beneficiaries scattered across every taluka in a state.
As reported by The Economic Times, the initiative aligns with Prime Minister Modi's Digital India 'One Nation, One Card' vision, launched under the banner of 'One Nation, One Card' to provide every Indian a single, indigenously built travel credential. Because the MSRTC card is NCMC-compliant and runs on the home-grown RuPay network, it isn't limited to Maharashtra's buses, working across any transit system in the country including metro, bus, suburban rail and water transport systems. The National Common Mobility Card is itself a Digital India initiative, conceived to give every Indian a single, indigenously built travel credential that works across any transit system in the country — metro, bus, suburban rail, water transport — without a separate card for each city or each operator. The Prime Minister has spoken about Digital India needing to reach the last village, not stop at the last metro station, and this rollout followed that approach, with issuance going into roughly 16,000 villages, reaching students, pensioners, persons with disabilities and rural daily travellers — many of whom did not already hold a digital payment instrument. For a number of them, this is the first payment credential they have carried.
According to The Economic Times, future plans include retail payments, auto-recharge, and expansion to metro and water transport systems. Once these features are implemented, the same concession card will also work as a general-purpose payment instrument. The bigger change may be on the back end, as concession travel is reimbursed by the state, and until now that reimbursement relied on manual counts. Every concessional journey is now logged with a timestamp, giving MSRTC an auditable record to work from instead of an estimate. The programme was formally inaugurated at a ceremony attended by Chief Minister Shri Devendra Fadnavis, Deputy Chief Minister Shri Eknath Shinde, Smt Sunetra Pawar, Transport Minister Shri Pratap Sarnaik, and MSRTC Managing Director Dr Madhav Kusekar.
