BusKaro
Real-time public transit app for Kolkata
Mobile app addressing Kolkata's untracked bus network: live GPS tracking with ETA, digital smart ticketing, AI-assisted route planning, and crowd monitoring. Validated with 255-response user survey and on-ground operator interviews. Gamified retention layer with Route Rally daily game.
The gap we found
Kolkata has thousands of buses and almost no digital infrastructure around them. No real-time tracking, no reliable schedule data, no digital ticketing. Existing apps like Chalo had pulled out of the city. Google Maps' transit data for Kolkata is partial at best.
We found our validation on Reddit — r/kolkata threads from people genuinely unable to figure out how to get from A to B by bus. 68.6% of 255 survey respondents cited lack of real-time location data as their biggest pain point. That was enough signal to start building.
On-ground research
Before writing a line of code, we spent a day at bus stands talking to conductors and operators. This was the most useful thing we did.
Operators were more receptive than we expected. One conductor showed us the daily sale report — handwritten revenue logs per bus per trip — and said "if someone could just put this on a phone." The problem wasn't adoption resistance. It was that nobody had shown up and asked.
We also learned that the GPS tracking problem is harder than it looks. Private buses don't have centrally managed GPS. The solution we prototyped — phones on buses reporting location to Firebase Realtime DB — is inelegant but actually works without any hardware changes.
Gamification and why it matters here
Transit apps live and die on daily active usage. You need people opening the app even on days they're not sure they'll take the bus.
The Route Rally mechanic — a daily trivia game about Kolkata's bus network — was designed to do exactly this. It keeps the app in the daily routine, surfaces obscure route knowledge that makes users feel competent, and creates a reason to return even for passive users.
We drew direct inspiration from Zomato Premier League's retention numbers: 15% D7 retention improvement from a single gamified event. For a transit app in a city that runs on habit, that kind of retention leverage is everything.
BusKaro is still a prototype. Getting the GPS data layer right requires operator buy-in at scale, which needs either government partnership or enough user traction to make operators come to us. That's the real product problem, and I don't think we've solved it yet.