Funding support from Sustainable Urban Mobility in Asia (SUMA) has been crucial for the EMBARQ India program to establish partnerships and consolidate our presence in India. Since 2008, we have achieved significant milestones in Indore, Pune and Bangalore.

Indore
In addition to planning and advisory support to ICTSL for the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), EMBARQ provided comprehensive technical support for the Indore bus service system. Some of our key contributions comprise of:
• a Bus Operations Plan for the pilot BRT corridor,
• a Detailed Project Report requesting for funding from the Central Government of India to expand the bus system fleet by 175 buses, which was approved under the JnNURM scheme,
• Support for research on Technical Specifications and preparation of tender documents for bus procurement under the JnNURM scheme scheme. This resulted in the selection of TATA Motors as the final supplier of the 125 semi low-floor buses.
TATA Motors was short-listed from among 6 bidders, based on their financial bid and offer of an annual maintenance contract. The buses are to arrive shortly.
• a new bus performance monitoring system. Bus conditions and operations have been monitored for the last two months using the new system and have shown a substantial improvement in operations.

Our consistent involvement in Indore has already resulted in improved management of bus system operations and continues to garner support from civil officers and elected representatives for systems improvement and the implementation of the Bus Rapid Transit corridor.

Bangalore
In Bangalore, EMBARQ conducted a multi-stakeholder workshop for raising awareness on active transport, gaining public commitment by the local authorities to develop a master plan for bicyclists, along with a planning unit within the local administration to initiate specific bike track projects identified during the workshop.

Pune
In Pune, EMBARQ teamed with Urban Mass Transport Company (UMTC) to review infrastructure designs, ridership forecasts and operations plans prepared by different consultants for the Pune BRT and provided input in the form of general guidelines, lessons from international examples and recommendations for reference material to improve the quality of project preparation.

In addition, EMBARQ has developed a report on Transport, Air Quality, and CO2 emission trends in twelve Indian Cities and a detailed report on data availability for two cities developing BRT projects in India. EMBARQ has also been active in capacity building efforts towards sustainable transportation in Indian cities.