WhatsApp on track to sell 100 million Metro tickets across India by end-2025: Meta's Sandhya Devanathan

WhatsApp, which counts India as its biggest market, began selling metro tickets through a pilot in Bengaluru in 2022

WhatsApp is on track to sell 100 million tickets across various Metro train services in India by the end of this year, Meta's Vice President for India and Southeast Asia, Sandhya Devanathan told Moneycontrol, highlighting the rising adoption of citizen services on the Meta-owned messaging app.

"The reason why it's picking up is because people find value and convenience," Devanathan told Moneycontrol in an interview.

WhatsApp, which counts India as its biggest market, began selling metro tickets through a pilot in Bengaluru in 2022. In partnership with the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL), the company launched a chatbot-based QR ticketing service integrated with UPI payments, making it the first transit service globally to enable end-to-end QR ticketing on WhatsApp.

Since then, WhatsApp has expanded this service to Metro rail providers in other Indian cities, including Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, and Nagpur, while also offering an expanded set of payment options such as credit and debit cards.

Meta's e-governance push

This initiative is part of Meta's broader push into e-governance in India through WhatsApp-based citizen service delivery models, aimed at helping citizens quickly access government services and schemes.

Since the beginning of this year, the social networking giant has partnered with the state governments of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, and Tamil Nadu to advance this effort.

The Chandrababu Naidu-led Andhra Pradesh government launched its chatbot, Mana Mitra, in January, offering over 160 citizen-centric services across categories such as electricity bill payments, temple seva bookings, bus ticket bookings, and revenue, municipal, and grievance services, through a single phone number. Since then, the offering has expanded to around 700 services and is being used by about 4 million people.

Devanathan said that in her recent discussions with the Andhra government, education emerged as the key use case. "They want to use it for things like child's attendance records and sending exam hall tickets on WhatsApp," she said.

She added that 90 percent of the hall tickets for Class 12 board exam students were sent through WhatsApp.

Moneycontrol has previously reported that Maharashtra plans to offer more than 500 services through a single number while Odisha aims to integrate 429 government services, as both states prepare to launch their own respective WhatsApp chatbots in the coming months.

Last month, Tamil Nadu announced that it will offer access to 50 government services through a single number in the first phase.

"If we can scale it in a reliable and safe way, and if people know it exists, that’s the best form of adoption. They won’t download 10 different apps, but they may use this one phone number to access all citizen services," Devanathan said.

Ramping up WhatsApp Business offerings

These efforts come as Meta looks to ramp up the adoption of WhatsApp's business offerings in India. The country, one of the largest markets for paid messaging globally, is central to Meta's business messaging ambitions, which have become a strategic priority as the company seeks to reduce its reliance on digital advertising.

"WhatsApp's global paid messaging revenue has already crossed a $1 billion annual run rate, and India is a big portion of it," Devanathan said.

On September 16, WhatsApp also unveiled a series of new features and enhancements to bolster its business offering.

This includes enabling small businesses to use the WhatsApp Business App and WhatsApp Business Platform simultaneously, and send in-app payment links to their customers.

Through the Webview capability, customers can also browse a merchant's website, add products to their cart, and complete transactions directly within a WhatsApp chat window.

Large businesses using the WhatsApp Business Platform will also be able to receive a call from a customer when they want to speak to someone live, or place a call themselves once the customer has asked to hear from them. This feature was first announced in June last year.

Meta said it will also soon add the ability to send and receive voice messages for additional support or make a video call, which can be useful in scenarios like telehealth appointments.

WhatsApp also stated that brands like Maruti Suzuki, Air India, and Flipkart have started using ads in the Status feature, which Indian consumers will start seeing soon in the Updates tab.