Punjab's intercity transport runs on private bus operators alongside the state undertaking, PRTC and Punbus. The private operators are in a number of cases owned by or connected to political families, and route permits have been a standing subject of allegation for decades.
For most Punjabis without a car the bus is how everything happens: work, college, hospital, court, wedding. Women's free bus travel, introduced in 2021, changed access to education and work for a large number of households and is one of the few welfare measures whose effect is visible on the buses themselves.
The stand in a district town is one of the few genuinely public spaces left: a place where people from every village in the tehsil are present at once.
Punjab has among the highest road accident fatality rates in India per vehicle, and the Grand Trunk Road stretch through the state is one of the deadliest corridors in the country.
The bus timetable is the actual map of a district and no district publishes one.
The state bus service and a very large private operator sector run the roads together, and the ownership of the private permits has been a political question for decades.
The bus is how rural Punjab moves: to the mandi, to college, to the district hospital, to the court. A village without a bus stop is a village whose young people cannot study.
Free travel for women, introduced in 2021, changed the passenger profile on the state buses substantially and the private operators objected to it in the courts.