Gujarat’s Aadinath Bulk Named Best Private Stage Carrier at Prawaas 5.0

Prawaas 5.0, India’s biggest show on public transport, was held from 9 to 11 July 2026 at the Helipad Exhibition Centre, Gandhinagar, and was organised by the Bus & Car Operators Confederation of India (BOCI). The edition marked BOCI’s tenth year and carried the theme “Towards Safe, Smart & Sustainable Passenger Mobility.” The Bharat Prawaas 5.0 was inaugurated by Shri Nitin Gadkari, Hon’ble Union Minister for Road Transport & Highways. Over three days the event drew close to 20,000 visitors, more than 220 exhibitors and delegates from 11 countries.

For Aadinath, the award came alongside a wider presence at the event. Company Director Jalpa Jain, who serves as Vice President of the Western Region for BOCI Naari, the confederation’s women’s wing, was a speaker at Prawaas 5.0 and shared the dais with Shri Nitin Gadkari and other Union and State ministers. She is among a small number of women holding a leadership position in a sector where the boardroom, the depot and the driver’s seat all remain overwhelmingly male.

“A bus company is judged on what it puts back, not only on what it carries,” said Jalpa Jain, Director, Aadinath Bulk Pvt. Ltd. “We have built Aadinath on three commitments: that it stays socially responsible to the people who work here and the cities we run in, that it grows on a sustainable model rather than an extractive one, and that it stays ahead on technology rather than catching up with it. IoT has become a buzzword in this industry over the last two or three years. We have been running on IoT since 2018. That gap is not an accident. It is what happens when you treat technology as the operation itself and not as a feature you add later. This recognition belongs to every person in this company, and if it makes one more woman look at transport as a career worth building, that will matter as much as the award does.”

Aadinath has run IoT-based fleet monitoring since 2018, well before the technology became common in Indian passenger transport. Its buses now carry a Driver Monitoring System that watches for signs of drowsiness or dizziness at the wheel, flags distraction, and raises an alert if a driver takes a call while driving. Those alerts reach a control centre that runs round the clock, which lets the company step in during a trip rather than review it afterwards. The system protects the driver first, then the passengers on board, and then everyone else sharing the road. The company reports on-road performance above 95 percent across its fleet.

Half of Aadinath’s 375-bus fleet now runs on CNG, and the company is preparing to add electric buses in the near term. Its commitments to its own people run alongside that. Employee health check-up camps are held regularly, accident cover and mediclaim are extended to staff as applicable, and drivers and conductors are trained in fire safety and primary emergency response so they can act in the first minutes of an incident rather than wait for help to reach them.

The company works across the government sector as well as the private sector, where its inter-city bus services, school bus transport, staff transport for corporates and industry, and inter-city cargo all run under its own brand, Aadigo. The fleet spans AC, non-AC, diesel, CNG and Volvo models, including over 110 Volvo coaches, and is backed by full-fledged maintenance facilities in Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Bhuj, Rajkot and Surat. Together, its intra-city and inter-city operations carry approximately one million passengers a month.

Aadinath’s leadership is anchored by two chartered accountants. Director and Chief Executive Officer Jinal Jain, a CA and M.Com graduate, leads financial strategy, project evaluation and growth. Chief Operating Officer Manoj Ahir, also a CA and M.Com graduate, runs operations and large-scale project delivery. Their reading of the numbers through the COVID years, when passenger transport was among the hardest-hit sectors in the country and operators across the industry shut down or sold out, kept the company intact through the shutdown and left it positioned to expand sharply once the roads reopened.

“We came out of the pandemic smaller in revenue but sharper in structure, and that is what let us scale the moment services resumed,” said Jinal Jain, Director & Chief Executive Officer, Aadinath Bulk Pvt. Ltd. “We started in 1996 moving furnace oil, and every step since has been a decision to build around systems rather than around vehicles. We are now working towards a fleet of 1,000 buses and preparing to take operations pan-India. Being named Best Private Stage Carrier tells us the model holds up against operators from across the country, which is the right signal to have before you go national.”

“A stage carriage operation is judged in the first hour of the day,” said Manoj Ahir, Chief Operating Officer, Aadinath Bulk Pvt. Ltd. “Depot readiness the night before, driver rosters, fuelling, and a workshop that can respond around the clock. We run maintenance facilities in five cities and keep spare buses on hand so that a breakdown never becomes a passenger left standing at a stop. The clearest test we have had was Mahakumbh 2025, where 24 of our buses completed 139 round trips over 3,90,033 kilometres with zero breakdowns and not one passenger complaint. That is the standard the thousand people in this company work to, and this award belongs to them.”

Gujarat operators had a strong showing across this year’s awards, taking all the zonal favourite bus operator honours at the redBus People’s Choice Awards. With Prawaas 5.0 hosted in Gandhinagar, the state was both host and a frequent name on the winners’ list.

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