Special to the Express: Why India’s next digital leap must be about mobility

Against that record, a taxi-hailing platform feels incremental. If any sector demands a system-level digital solution, it is mobility.

India’s cities are under strain. Commuters navigate extreme weather, toxic air, traffic congestion and public transport that is often unreliable or poorly connected. Daily travel has become an exhausting exercise in managing uncertainty: switching between apps, coping with delays, negotiating last-mile gaps and sitting in endless jams. Mobility today is stressful, inefficient and inequitable.

A Transport Digital Public Infrastructure, or Tr-DPI, could change this fundamentally. Like Aadhaar or UPI, it would act as a common digital backbone. Instead of focusing on one mode of transport, it would connect all of them: buses, metros, suburban rail, taxis, autos, parking systems, ferries and even airport shuttles. The goal is not control, but coordination.

The problem today is not a lack of data, but fragmentation. Real-time information exists across rail signalling systems, metro control rooms, bus GPS networks, taxi platforms and airport traffic systems. But it remains locked in silos. A Tr-DPI would standardise and securely share four critical data streams: vehicle location, routes and schedules, fares and ticketing, and disruptions or delays. Open standards would allow authorised apps to build user-friendly services on top of this shared backbone.

For commuters, the impact would be transformative. A single interface could suggest the fastest route, show real-time availability across modes, calculate walking distances between connections and flag delays before they cause chaos. Commute planning would become predictable rather than speculative: leave at a precise time, switch seamlessly between modes and reach work on schedule.

QR-based tickets, subscriptions

Payments are the other missing piece. A Tr-DPI could enable a single, cardless mobility wallet across metros, buses, autos, parking lots, tolls and suburban rail, building on and improving the National Common Mobility Card. One QR-based ticket on a phone could work everywhere, while private players innovate with passes, subscriptions and incentives.

The gains would extend to city administrators as well. Today, urban transport planning often happens in the dark. A Tr-DPI could generate real-time dashboards for congestion, demand, parking usage, and incidents, enabling faster responses and better long-term planning. As UPI unlocked an ecosystem of payment innovation, a transport DPI could catalyse new services in journey planning, ride sharing, smart parking and urban logistics.

India is urbanising at speed. By 2035, nearly half its population will live in cities. The economic cost of congestion and inefficiency is already enormous. We do not need another taxi app. We need a unified mobility system that restores predictability, dignity and efficiency to daily travel. India has shown it can build digital infrastructure at scale. It is time to apply that ambition to how we move.

(The writer is Deputy Director General, Unique Identification Authority of India, Chandigarh)