JoharBus

Local bus timings, crowd-verified by commuters

Android

Travel

When I was in 12th class, I traveled 6 km daily by local bus to reach my intermediate school. That's when I noticed the real pain point: nobody knows the exact time a local bus will arrive at a stop, so you end up waiting there, often for a long time, just hoping it shows up. If JoharBus (or something like it) had existed back then, we could've checked the timings ourselves — and if the bus was too late, switched to a different way to travel instead of just waiting around. And this isn't just my problem — it's everywhere. If someone wants to travel from one place to another on a local bus, they either have to remember the timings themselves or ask someone who knows. This information was never available online. The only way to get it was to physically go to the bus stand and ask the conductor. My approach was simple: build something like the "Where is my Train" app, but for local buses. I started learning app development from YouTube, mainly from the CodeWithHarry course, and later took help from AI as well to build it out. For Stage 1, I built the app around one core idea: bus timetables submitted by users themselves, so people don't have to remember timings and can help others avoid waiting at the stop with no idea when the bus will arrive. I kept developing and improving it version by version, and the final version I published to the Play Store was v5. I'm currently a student with no income, so I used my own savings from a school scholarship to buy the Google Play Developer account and fund some of the app's marketing. It's been just 3 months since launch, and that marketing effort brought in 500+ downloads. Right now the app has 45+ local bus routes with timings and stops. My plan is to expand city by city — cover my own city first, then move to the next, and so on — until JoharBus has local bus data for all of Santhal Pargana, Jharkhand. Once I have enough route data, the next step is to introduce local bus ticket booking — not AC or sleeper buses, but everyday local buses, since there's currently no single platform in India offering ticket booking specifically for that segment. I already have a strategy for this stage, which I'll implement once the data foundation is strong enough.