Mid-Day Anniversary Special: M-Indicator founder Sachin Suryakant Teke reveals how a daily commute gave birth to Mumbai`s vital passenger app

Sachin Suryakant Teke, founder, M-Indicator

This is the story of that ubiquitous blue and red mobile app which most of 80 lakh Mumbai rail commuters use during every single journey, day in and day out. M-Indicator, with over 15 million downloads, user friendly interface, extensive details and real-time updates, has today become a vital tool for commuters in the city, with millions of users relying on it daily.

The story of how it was started by a struggling Mumbai commuter is equally fascinating. Crushed in the ‘dense load’ of Mumbai’s lifeline suburban trains and frustrated by everyday’s chaotic travel, Sachin Suryakant Teke (40) founder and CEO of Mobond Software Consultancy, which owns the application, Teke is the man who for the first time inserted the city’s local train timetable in your mobile.

Teke’s invention is so ‘Appt’ for the Mumbai commuter. Pics/Rane Ashish

A 2006 pass out from VJTI Matunga studying his MBA while working as a software engineer, Teke, Nerul resident used to commute to his Andheri SEEPZ office every day. The struggle to reach and return, the daily delays and cancellations with abrupt announcements and lack of clear communication made Teke step back and think. He said,  “One day, I saw people buying the pocket suburban railway timetable. I also bought one for Rs 10 studied it well and thought this is one project I could take up and help people like me.”

For Teke, research meant, “standing at Dadar station’s foot over bridge (FOB) and studying commuters. I saw what app they were using. It was all ground work. The first version was a Java version and I could compile the data in about 160 KB. For building such an app, the lighter it is, it works well and the challenge was to compress the data further. All this was around 2009,” he explained.

Then he said, “A year later, we launched the app with much technical success. It was live but the response was slow. In six months, there had been just 2,500 downloads. I decided to go back to the drawing board. A German research paper proved handy and I decided to apply the principles. The app was reworked and the German principles proved to be a game changer. In the first 15 minutes of the relaunch, there were 1,000 downloads,” he said. 
 
Now there are many such apps in the market with even the Railways having their own one, but the old and faithful m-indicator started by a struggling commuter with passion continues to remain a hit. In comparison to global transit and city apps like CityMapper and Moovit, m-indicator has the benefit of being hyper-local with an integrated digital hub for all Mumbai transit modes like metro, mono and all other modes of transit.

2006
Year he passed out from VJTI