Mumbaikars, now you can live track a Mumbai local train!

A screengrab of m-indicator app. Pic/ Rajendra B. Aklekar

Good news for Mumbaikars! Finally, you can now track your local train in realtime. The M-Indicator app, that is popular with 8 million commuters, has now gone live, by community-sourcing. It manages to track down realtime train timings by sharing location updates from commuters.

If you are on the platform, it sends you an alert on the arrival time of the next train and if you are on board the train, it asks you if you are 'in this train', after which the app informs you to get your location information. The algorithms then use this to calculate the location of the train itself.

While the Central Railway has been stuck with in its app development, the Western Railway Disha App manages to track trains but with a few limitations. It is based on the timetable and the arrival and departure time of trains at the station.

The m-indicator app was launched by an engineer from VJTI Sachin Teke in May 2010 under the brand name Mobond, a combination of two words 'Mob' and 'Bond', suggesting its aim is to 'bonding the mob' or 'bonding the angry crowd'.

Teke has been a struggling commuter himself and developed the app after realising that there is no way to know the expected time of arrival of a train or any dynamic timetable app. After graduation in 2006, he worked for a software firm and developed mobile applications during which he travelled from Nerul to Seepz, Andheri, using all modes of transport. The frustration and experience of this commute is the m-indicator.

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