love it.. check out this report of how laloo’s indian railways would allow advertising on the trains. laloo prasad yadav (the railway minister) is going to invite bids to name trains after corp brands. here’s another report on the pilot program, which named a train Kurkure (indian version of chee-tos) Express. Image of the train here.
what do you think? would google auction the ad-spaces on reservation lists? here are some indian railway stats : 108k kilometers total track, 11k trains daily, 13M passengers transported every day. i think there is a huge ad-market here.
is it interesting, or simply hilarious 
There is a reason why we name trains and buses according to places and it is because its easier for people (read uneducated) to remember the names of the trains and relate to them. The same thing applies to the APSRTC buses. Even if people cannot read what is written on the board of the buses they can relate to the number of the bus and get into it. I seriously think that naming trains according to brands is a big mistake in a country where half of the people still can’t read.
Nice blog by the way
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thanks kamesh. totally agree that this is a bad idea.. it’s one thing to display ads on the coaches and whole another thing to name them after the brands.
even for the display ads, i wonder if.. a big IF.. the travel would be subsidized by advertising. google would gladly oblige, i think.
i went back and forth between bangalore and hyderabad several times, and my dad is a railway man. deep inside i feel that the sanctity of railways as the lifeblood of the country is being ever so slightly diluted by crap like this.
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