The National Common Mobility Card crossed a crore of daily transactions this week — one card now tapping through all 23 metro networks, and, in the milestone's real news, through city buses in five pilot cities where the feeder-integration experiment begins.
The feeder pilot is the piece the 1,000-kilometre milestone was waiting for. Metros underperform ridership projections when the last mile fails; the pilot routes feeder buses to station schedules with single-fare NCMC journeys — train plus bus priced as one trip, the integration Indian transit has promised since the first DPR.
The card's quiet expansion beyond transit matters too: parking at 40 station lots, toll lanes in two states, and the retail acceptance that makes it a de facto low-value wallet for the un-carded — the India-stack pattern playing out at turnstile speed.
The honest ledger: interoperability still fails on the oldest gates in two legacy networks, and bus fleets outside the pilots run parallel ticketing that defeats the point.
But a crore of daily taps is a habit, and habits are infrastructure. The next audit is ridership itself: if feeders fill trains, the second thousand kilometres inherit better economics than the first. City files on our cities desk.
