The launch of the Chennai One mobile application, sponsored by the Tamil Nadu government’s Chennai Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority (CUMTA) and hailed as India’s first integrated public transport ticketing system, is a commendable step toward modernising urban mobility.
For generations, the most common hassle with bus travel has been the frustrating scarcity of ‘balance change’. Digital ticketing promises to eradicate this daily friction, ensuring seamless payment and convenience for the commuter.
Yet, while the Chennai One app resolves the small problem of change, it deepens the bigger problem of accountability. A great app cannot fix a broken bus, and the state's embrace of digital tools with access to commuters’ data must come with a reciprocal commitment to public transparency.
The Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC), Chennai’s public bus service, is a vital public asset crucial for urban equity and major social welfare schemes such as Vidiyal Payanam (free travel for women in ordinary public buses). When MTC buses fail to utilise this shared public asset effectively, it is not just an inconvenience—it becomes a critical governance challenge.
For Chennai’s bus commuters, MTC's unreliability is a daily crisis of uncertainty. It means there is no fixed schedule to rely on, and even with digital efforts, not all buses are trackable on the apps.
This leaves passengers with no choice but to stand and wait helplessly at bus stops, wasting hours. This reality is acutely felt on routes like the vital 21G, connecting Kilambakkam to Broadway, which face drastic service cuts.
Factors such as the diversion of buses to the new MAA1 airport service, Metro construction traffic diversions in Mylapore, and unmanaged overall trip times, lead to cancelled services. This situation leaves essential users such as college students and patrons of the Anna Centenary Library stranded due to profoundly unreliable service.
As per MTC’s official Key Performance Indicators which are not always transparently defined, the buses have a utilisation rate of 85%. But MTC’s own annual report for 2023-24 says that it saw 24 lakh lost trips.
This gap between the utilisation metric and the lost trips analysis is difficult to understand with the limited information shared publicly by MTC. But it possibly reflects a failure of management, resource allocation, and public policy. This is especially worrying given MTC's potential surplus of around 8,000 crew members against the Corporation’s frequent claims of crew shortage.
These operational challenges also carry a devastating financial burden. MTC’s modernisation is heavily financed by international loans, notably World Bank support, which subsidise private operators via Gross Cost Contracts (GCC) at around Rs 77/km. These debts are ultimately shouldered by the public.
Operational inefficiency most severely impacts social progress, exposing schemes such as Vidiyal Payanam to failure.
MTC's failure to provide transparent data on converting deluxe buses to ordinary (pink) buses, coupled with necessary scrapping of older buses, means the critical pink buses are effectively shrinking from a commuter’s perspective.
Figures from the state Department of Information and Public Relations show that the number of pink buses have gone down from 1,500 in November 2024 to 1,212 in September 2025. After scrapping older buses, the MTC issued instructions to paint its BS4 Red Bus (a relatively newer fleet of buses) pink and operate them as ordinary fare or pink buses. But MTC hasn’t been transparent about how many such red buses have been changed to pink.
This intentional lack of verifiable daily operational data is a profound governance failure, obscuring the true state of affairs from public representatives and policymakers.
When vital operational data—including the status of pink buses, crew allocation, and contract burdens—is locked away, it prevents informed policy-making.
This failure extends to mandated technology, such as the non-enforcement of 100% GPS tracking required by procurement norms. Policymakers currently rely on opaque internal KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), but effective governance demands radical transparency, ensuring decisions are grounded in the verifiable reality of the road, not closed-door figures.
The Solution: Digital Data to Enforce Accountability
To close this chasm, the digital future of MTC must pivot from consuming commuters’ personal data (a key issue given the need for privacy-preserving solutions) to publishing operator efficiency data in real-time.
The data asymmetry is staggering: the state gains real-time data on commuters via the app, yet the public receives only vague, historical numbers in an annual PDF report.
Citizen accountability tools, such as the Right to Information (RTI) process, annual reports, and policy notes in the Legislative Assembly are in desperate need of a digital overhaul.
If governance is transforming to collect real-time personal data through these apps, it must reciprocally publish real-time governance data in readily consumable digital formats. This transparency is the prerequisite for accountability.
Even as the state experiments with the Gross Cost Contract (GCC) model, thereby proxy privatising public transit operations, the buses remain a definitive public asset. Therefore, the public must still own the resulting efficiency data, enforcing accountability for the massive subsidies paid.
This demand must be rooted in the concept of citizen ownership—the spirit of "Ithu Ungal Soththu - This is your property," popularised by the classic Vadivelu joke.
A digital mechanism for vigilance is needed to crowdsource and display real-time failure data, forcing operational efficiency. This ensures the Rs 77/km paid out of public debt translates to a safe, reliable, and respectful journey.
True transport modernisation requires recognising that the bus system belongs to the citizens, and granting them the digital tools to enforce that ownership. The failure to offer operational data is MTC’s biggest unkept promise.
While the Chennai One app solves the trivial issue of physical ‘balance change’, the true balance owed to the public is systemic accountability in the form of verifiable, digital operational data.
Only by making this shift from transactional convenience to systemic transparency can CUMTA realistically expect citizens to choose public transit over private vehicles, moving beyond mere payment conveniences to genuine trust and modernisation.
Srikanth Lakshmanan is a public interest technologist interested in public transit. He runs the #IthuUngalSoththu transparency initiative on MTC operations, available at ithuungalsoththu.vercel.app.