Picture this. Of the 260-odd buses available between Delhi and Dehradun—a distance spanning 290 km—on a travel aggregator’s platform, nearly 85% are air-conditioned and 46% have sleeper berth options. For the 530-km-long journey between Delhi and Lucknow, there are some 450 buses available, of which 68% are air-conditioned and 57% are sleepers. On the nearly 900-km Pune-Bengaluru route, nearly all buses are air-conditioned and sleepers.
In 2024-25, more than 72,000 new intercity bus routes were added in India and around 6,400 new buses launched to create an additional 265,000 daily seats, according to redBus’s India BusTrack report. Between January and March 2025, 59.59 million seats were sold on intercity buses operated by private operators, up from 50.9 million in the previous year. The gross ticketing value for these seats stood at Rs 5,960 crore ($672 million).
In some corridors connecting some of the major cities of the country—for instance, Delhi-Lucknow, Delhi-Jaipur, Mumbai-Pune and Bengaluru-Chennai—buses are now faster than 90% of the trains plying on the same route.
It appears that intercity bus travel is at an inflection point. This mode of transportation that has, for a very long time, served as the lifeline of the country—connecting major metros to the hinterlands—is quietly undergoing an upgrade in every possible way. What comes as a surprise is that this is not a transformation that is led by the government or a multinational company. Rather, this change is the result of the joint efforts of startups like IntrCity, zingbus, LeafyBus, FreshBus and NueGo, which are looking to rebrand the identity of intercity bus travel in India.
Continue reading: themorningcontext.com/internet/the-intercity-bus-bet-by-indian-startups-is-having-its-moment
