The acronyms in a transport tender, defined by someone who has had to answer them.

Every one of these appears in Indian and international transport procurement, and most of them are used loosely. These are the definitions this site uses, so that when a page says AFCS or PVR it means one thing.

AFCS — Automatic Fare Collection System: Everything between a rider paying and the money being reconciled: validators, gates, handhelds, vending machines, the fare rules they apply, and the clearing that follows. The hardware is the visible part; the reconciliation is the part that decides whether a deployment works. More on AFCS & NCMC →
AIS-140 — Automotive Industry Standard 140: The Indian standard for vehicle location tracking and emergency response in public service vehicles. It covers both a certified device on the vehicle and a conforming push of the record to the state's VLTD backend. The two obligations are usually priced as one and are not. More on AIS-140 →
BRT — Bus Rapid Transit: Bus services given dedicated right of way, level boarding and off-board fare collection, so that headway rather than timetable is what a rider relies on. Planning a BRT corridor is closer to planning a metro line than to planning a bus route.
DPR — Detailed Project Report: The document an authority commissions before committing to a scheme: demand, diagnosis, design, quantification and cost. Its credibility rests on whether the numbers can be traced back to a survey rather than to an assumption. More on DPR →
DRT — Demand Responsive Transport: Services with no fixed timetable and often no fixed route, assembled from bookings. Staff transport is the most common form of it in practice, where a roster is the demand and the route is computed from it.
GTFS — General Transit Feed Specification: The open format for publishing a transit schedule, and GTFS-Realtime for publishing what is happening now. A feed can be perfectly valid and describe services that stopped running years ago; validity and accuracy are different questions. More on GTFS →
NCMC — National Common Mobility Card: India's open-loop card specification, intended so that one card works across operators and modes. Its value depends on acceptance breadth rather than on the card itself.
OTP — On-Time Performance: The share of departures or arrivals inside a tolerance of the scheduled time. The number is meaningless without the tolerance and the measurement point, which is why two organisations reporting OTP rarely mean the same thing.
PVR — Peak Vehicle Requirement: The number of vehicles needed to run the timetable at its busiest, which sets the fleet you must own regardless of how quiet the rest of the day is. Blocking and run-cutting exist largely to reduce it.
Run-cutting: Cutting vehicle blocks into legal driver duties, against working-time rules, break rules and depot constraints. Distinct from blocking, which chains trips into vehicle workings; conflating the two is the most common reason a schedule cannot actually be crewed.
UMTA — Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority: A city-level body that plans, contracts and pays for transport others operate. Its software problem is evidence rather than operations: what was promised, what ran, and what the contract says about the difference. More on UMTAs →
VLTD — Vehicle Location Tracking Device: The AIS-140 term for the unit on the vehicle, and by extension for the state backend that receives its records. "VLTD backend" in a tender usually means the state system a feed must be pushed to.

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Last updated 5 September 2026