Ebix and NSDL Payment bank crosses 1 crore NCMC issuances and puts India's first concessional bus passengers on a smartcard Contact photo

2026-08-19 12:06:41 Business

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Mumbai, 19 August 2026 — Ebix Technologies and its distribution arm Ebix Payment Services along with the NDSL payment banks has issued more than one crore NCMC RuPay smartcards in five months — a pace of roughly 66,000 cards a day, or about 46 every minute, sustained without a break. It ranks among the fastest issuance runs recorded by a financial institution on the RuPay network in India.

What matters more than the number is who is now holding these cards.

For the first time anywhere in the country, a 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. 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 END OF THE PAPER PASS

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. Passes were difficult to verify, easy to misuse, and left the state reconciling a large annual subsidy mostly by hand.

On the NCMC card, the concession entitlement is stored on the chip. The ticketing machine validates it offline in under a second, which matters on routes where a bus halts for barely thirty seconds. Checking a pass at the door has been replaced by a simple tap.

WHY A CRORE IN FIVE MONTHS IS HARD

Card programmes of this size ordinarily take well over a year. Almost none of them involve 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.

MSRTC's network reaches roughly 16,000 villages. Issuance followed that network rather than concentrating in Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur, which is what made the rollout difficult, and also what made it worthwhile.

EbixCash Payment Solutions, an RBI-regulated entity holding AD-II, FFMC, MTSS and PPI licences, ran the end-to-end chain: card personalisation, issuance, fare collection, transaction processing and concession validation at the point of travel. NSDL Payments Bank acted as issuing bank on the RuPay network.

THE MSRTC SMART CARD CONCESSION PROJECT

The issuance sits within MSRTC's Smart Card Concession Project, a corporation-wide programme to move statutory concessional travel off paper entirely. Maharashtra extends subsidised fares to a wide set of categories under state policy — school and college students, senior citizens, persons with disabilities, freedom fighters, journalists and others — and each category previously carried its own pass format, its own renewal cycle and its own verification headache at the door.

Under the project, every one of those entitlements is written to the chip on a single NCMC card. 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. Category, validity and concession slab are verified at the machine, offline, at the moment of boarding.

For the corporation, the bigger change may be on the back end. 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.

ALIGNED WITH THE PRIME MINISTER'S DIGITAL INDIA VISION

The National Common Mobility Card is itself a Digital India initiative. Launched by Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi under the banner of 'One Nation, One Card', it was 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.

Because the MSRTC card is NCMC-compliant and runs on the home-grown RuPay network, it isn't limited to Maharashtra's buses. The same card a student taps in a taluka town also works on a metro in another state, which is the core design intent of the NCMC framework — extending India's transit payments, alongside Aadhaar and UPI, into national digital infrastructure.

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. Issuance went 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.

Retail payment integration, auto-recharge, and expansion to metro and water transport are next on the roadmap. Once those are in place, the same concession card will also work as a general-purpose payment instrument.

"We've run large card programmes before, but not at this speed, and not for this set of passengers. A student or a pensioner in a village now carries the same card as anyone else in the country. That was the point of the exercise."

"MSRTC and NSDL Payments Bank were both clear that this had to reach the depot network, not just the cities, and that shaped how we built it. We'd like to run this same model for other transit and concession programmes." Said T C GURUPRASAD, Managing Director, EbixCash Payment Solutions

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.

About EbixCash Payment Solutions

EbixCash Payment Solutions is an RBI-regulated Indian payments company holding AD-II, FFMC, MTSS and PPI licences. Its work spans transit technology, prepaid card issuance and large-scale payment system