Founded in Guwahati in 2022 with a belief that a car rental company could run on written standards, accountable people and verifiable trip records — not just good intentions.
In 2022, Queen Bhardwaj — then a postgraduate from IIM Kozhikode and a long-time observer of Northeast India's travel ecosystem — noticed something consistent across car rental companies in Guwahati: the service was informal, undocumented and inconsistent. Good on some days, unreliable on others. Entirely dependent on which driver showed up.
She founded Palanquin Ecotales in July 2022 with a different idea — that a car rental company in Guwahati could run on the same principles as any well-managed business: written procedures, accountable people, transparent pricing and a verifiable record of every trip.
That idea is still the foundation of everything here.
Before adding vehicles, Palanquin Ecotales built the operating layer — written SOPs for drivers, a structured vendor onboarding process, a pricing framework and a bookings workflow. The v9 SOP, updated in June 2026, covers 8 sections, 4 annexures, 15 driver subsections and a 14-point pre-trip vehicle checklist. It is not a document that sits in a folder. It is the operating manual.
In 2024, we built our own Duty Management System — a proprietary platform covering trip booking, driver dispatch, live GPS tracking and digital duty slips. It is live at duty.thepalanquin.co.in and is used for every corporate trip we run.
These are not features we market. They are how we operate.
Corporate clients — manufacturing plants, technology companies, FMCG brands — use us for ETS contracts, monthly retainers and MICE events. They get digital duty slips, GST invoicing and a dedicated account manager. Our first ETS contract (a leading FMCG organisation, Nalbari plant) went live in June 2026.
Individual guests — tourists, families, solo travellers exploring Northeast India — get a WhatsApp-based booking experience backed by the same trained drivers and written standards as our corporate operations. The two tracks do not overlap and neither is treated as secondary.
We also added self-drive car rental in 2026 — 24 cars across hatchbacks, SUVs and MUVs, for guests who prefer to drive themselves.
Queen holds a BS in Chemistry, an MBA from Gauhati University and a one-year hybrid MBA in Strategy from IIM Kozhikode. She founded Palanquin Ecotales in 2022 after identifying a structural gap in how car rental companies in Northeast India were managed — not a gap in vehicles, but in systems, standards and accountability.
She manages B2B client relationships, corporate account strategy, technology decisions and the overall direction of the company. She is also the primary point of escalation for all corporate accounts and the author of the company's SOP framework.
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