IIT Kharagpur alum develops travel site for Indian masses -- provides ability to search both flights and trains

I personally checked the site (http://www.90di.com/travel/), and it was awesome! Planning my travel to places with no direct airplane connectivity was horrible. But now, 90di allows users to plan either train journey, or an airplane journey, or a combination of both. Moreover, they direct you to the website of the original carrier for final booking, much like kayak.com in US.

Here's the background of Mr. Khusnood Naqvi:
Co-founder/ Programmer/ Director

Khushnood is a computer programmer and aspires to develop useful Internet applications in his, this new, avatar of an Entrepreneur. In the past he has developed and architected lots of applications and products in various areas. Some of these are in the area of: BPM/Workflow Engine; Telecom monitoring tools and applications; Insurance domain applications; PKI based security products; Credit card processing systems; and also contributed to the design of some Internet applications in the Web 1.0 days! His prior work experience has been with Infosys, which exposed him to all the diverse domains (mentioned above) and also various generations of technologies. Over the last 2 years of his stay there, he had been playing the role of a Principal Architect. Khushnood holds a Bachelors of Technology degree in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from IIT Kharagpur.



Here's a past article on the site

Bangalore: The explosion in the private airline business and the emergence of many budget carriers has opened India’s skies to thousands of its citizens.

But there are lakhs for whom this is still unaffordable — or who can think of an air trip only when combined with a journey by a cheaper mode. So far they have been denied the advantages of an Internet -based service.

Now three engineers in Bangalore, have come together to close this gap: Khushnood Naqvi, Kiran M.S., and Abhinit Kumar, all formerly employed at Infosys, recently launched a company, Ninety Degree Internet Software. Their flagship offering is an India-specific travel search engine — www.90di.com — which aggregates information from Indian Railways as well as all airlines in India. Most usefully , it allows travellers to create an itinerary based exclusively on train or air — or a combination of the two. The data base covers over 4000 Indian places — and the strength of the search facility lies in its ability to suggest all possible ways to get from here to there. Users can view various option, even call up a map to trace the rout. They can then ‘mix and match’ rail and air links and work out a combination that fits their purse.

In many respects the rail search facility is an improvement over anything offered by the Railways themselves and a few trials searches by this correspondent threw up many alternatives that would have been difficult to track down by reading the time tables. The site is also very useful if air services connect only part of the proposed trip: For example it will suggest the fastest connection from Delhi to Kottayam: by air to Kochi and then the best rail connection from there.

Mr. Naqvi, Ninety Degree’s Director, told The Hindu that the web resource does not do the booking — it lets the user finalise the itinerary and then provides links to the online booking facilities of the individual airlines. For train bookings the link leads to the IRCTC page which is India’s busiest e-commerce site. 90DI is a starkly simple-looking but feature-rich resource that will ease the hassles of travel planning for many of us.