EMBARQ participated in a two day Symposium on ‘Public Transportation for Indian cities with special focus on Bus Rapid Transit Systems on 20-21 January 2010. The Symposium was held at the India Habitat Center, and organized by Delhi Integrated Multi-Modal Transit System (DIMTS) and the International Association of Public Transport (UITP) .The symposium was inaugurated by the Hon’ble Chief Minister of Delhi Smt. Sheila Dikshit and was attended by the Chief Secretary of Delhi Shri Rakesh Mehta.

The symposium was attended by approximately 150-200 national and international academicians, experts from the field of urban transport, and senior government officials from Delhi and other states of India. The symposium provided an excellent platform to discuss, understand, analyze and find solutions to implement an integrated and efficient public transport system in Indian cities.

The symposium had experts from various countries talking about their challenges and experience while implementing BRTS and sharing important lessons for cities which are planning to implement BRT in India. Madhav Pai, EMBARQ- India Technical Director spoke about EMBARQ and it's network partner SUM Turkiye’s experience working with the BRT project in Istanbul,where in 2007, Istanbul started an experiment with Metrobus, a BRT like system on the cities expressways. The initial BRT line opened in October 2007 and was so successful that sparked rapid expansions. The 10.3 km expansion commissioned in September 2008 was completed in 8 months. The symposium also included a panel discussion on ‘Public Transportation solutions for small and medium sized cities covered under JnNURM’, as well as discussions on the technology solutions such as Intelligent Signalling, GPS based vehicle tracking and Automatic Fare Collection System, which form an integral part of an efficient BRT system.