Title - Revolution foreseen in bus, rail ticket transactions on smartphone

A digital payment ecosystem accessible on mobile phones could drive ticket transactions for various modes of urban public transport in the near future, D. Shivkumar, Managing Director and vice-president of Nokia India said on Friday.In his keynote address at a retail conference hosted by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Mr. Shivkumar said that bus and rail ticket transactions could move to Near Field Communication (NFC) platforms on smartphones and well represent the mode of retail payments of the future.According to Mr. Shivkumar, several Metro Rail and bus transport corporations were evincing keen interest in adopting NFC technologies for ticket dispensing as a forward-looking measure that would virtually eliminate queues and check fraud.He predicted that much like India skipped the personal computer stage of technology evolution to move into era of the mobile Internet, it would bypass credit cards and head straight for cashless digital transactions.Holding retail as one of the emerging and fastest growing sectors in future with potential of turning a $675 billion business by 2016, Mr. Shivkumar said adaptation to technology, power, retail space price and soft skills on the shop floor would be the key drivers for the growth.While structurally, the Indian retail landscape would remain the same as big and small stores coexist, the bottom line for growth would be efficiency. Retail, along with telecom and agriculture had the potential to be the top three sectors in terms of contribution to GDP.

Kumar Ramanathan, director-commercial analytics-Africa, Middle East & Asia Pacific, Vodafone India, said retail would need to tap deeper into rural consumer base in future in a country with a urban-rural duality like India where consumption was the common connect. The key aspect was that in 2011, 57 per cent of the GDP was accounted by household consumption, he said. R. Dinesh, Chairman CII’s TN State Council, said retail chains in India were focusing on hinterlands in a big way as a large share of the revenue pie comes from rural sales.

The Indian retail sector, which currently accounted for 14 per cent of the country’s GDP and contributes 8 per cent of the total employment, is expected to grow to $850 billion by 2020.

Addressing the session ‘Clicks vs Bricks,’ Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Google India, said Internet was fast penetrating into tier 2 and tier 3 towns in India. In fact, 48 per cent of the base of Internet users is from towns with population of less than 10 lakh.