Rideshares no silver bullet for urban India’s mobility woes
reliance on personal vehicles, thus aiding in traffic decongestion and pollution reduction, all while generating employment opportunities for hundreds of thousands of young people otherwise lacking the specialized skills for traditional job markets. Going by what the ride-share companies are saying, a lot of these objectives appear to have been met.
Ola, for instance, says it is used for more than a billion rides every year, offers multiple mobility options in more than 250 cities, and offers a sustainable income to more than 15 lakh “driver partners". Uber, on its 10th anniversary, pointed out that over the past decade, it had completed 300 crore trips and offered a cumulative ₹50,000 crore in earnings to more than 3 million partner drivers (though its current driver strength is estimated at around 8 lakh across all modes) since it started operations in Bengaluru in 2013.
It also released the findings of a survey it conducted among its users on the occasion, where an overwhelming 90% of respondents said the app had revolutionised the way they travel in India, while a significant 72% said the easy availability of mobility options made possible by the platform had made them “re-evaluate" their purchase of a personal vehicle. So much so, that in 2019, when the automobile industry in India saw an unprecedented 30% drop in sales, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had gone so far as to say that the probable root of the sector’s woes lay in the rise of ride-share companies, as well as the changing mindset of millennials on owning assets like personal vehicles.
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