Ebixcash And NSDL Payments Bank Cross 1 Crore NCMC Issuances For MSRTC
FinTech BizNews Service
Mumbai, 20 August 2026: EbixCash Payment Solutions, in partnership with NSDL Payments Bank, has crossed a significant milestone under the Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation's (MSRTC) Smart Card Concession Project, issuing more than 1 crore NCMC RuPay smartcards in five months. This translates to approximately 66,000 cards a day, or nearly 46 cards every minute, as the programme scales digital and contactless access to concessional bus travel across Maharashtra.
The programme is enabling eligible MSRTC passengers, including students, senior citizens, persons with disabilities, freedom fighters and other notified categories, to move from traditional paper-based concession passes to a single NCMC-enabled smartcard. Under the project, concession eligibility, validity and applicable fare slabs are linked to the card and can be validated electronically at the time of boarding. This replaces manual verification of paper passes with a faster, digital process while creating a transaction record for each concessional journey.
The rollout has been carried out through MSRTC's depot network, with the corporation's extensive operations reaching roughly 16,000 villages across Maharashtra. This allows beneficiaries to enrol closer to where they already travel, rather than relying solely on access to banks or district offices, supporting wider adoption across rural and semi-urban parts of the state.
EbixCash Payment Solutions provides the technology and payment infrastructure supporting the programme, including card personalisation, issuance, fare collection and transaction processing. NSDL Payments Bank acts as the issuing bank, with the cards operating on the RuPay network under the National Common Mobility Card (NCMC) framework.
The NCMC framework is a Digital India initiative developed under the Government of India's 'One Nation, One Card' vision, aimed at enabling interoperable payments across participating public transport systems. The MSRTC programme brings this framework into a large-scale concessional travel programme, extending the benefits of digital mobility payments beyond conventional urban transit.
The programme also lays the foundation for the next phase of the NCMC journey, with retail payment integration, auto-recharge and potential expansion to metro and water transport on the roadmap. These enhancements could further extend the card's use beyond concessional bus travel into everyday mobility and payments.
Commenting on the milestone, T C Gurupasad, Managing Director, EbixCash Payment Solutions, said, “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”
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.
