As a part of its Road-Safety Programme ride-hailing company, Ola has launched project ‘Guardian’ that is aimed to improve the overall customer safety on Ola Cabs. Ola Guardian is a real-time monitoring system and has been launched as a pilot in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Pine as a part of Ola’s national programme on safety, ‘Street Safe.’ Ola further confirms that this new feature, Guardian will go live in Delhi and Kolkata by the end of next month and will be rolled out in other cities by the end of the year.
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So what does this mean for Ola users and customers? Guardian project will be applicable on all ongoing Ola trips and will be tracked by analysing ride indicators that include route deviations, unexpected and midway stops. Ola further says that based on the indicators and time of travel, safety triggers will be created which will be attended to immediately by Ola’s Safety Response Team (SRT). After analysing the data, the Safety Response Team will connect with the customer to assess any potential unsafe ride and provide assistance as required making the overall journey safer.
Ola has further integrated real-time data into the project to further enhance the Guardian’s response. The company also confirmed that it is working with government authorities to map dark spots and unsafe routes into the monitoring platform to enhance the monitoring system’s performance.
Ankur Agrawal, VP – Business Excellence & Safety at Ola said, “ The Guardian project is a major step in this direction, which accelerates Ola’s past efforts in holistically making roads and rides safer and build confidence amongst customers and driver-partners to feel safe on the platform round-the-clock.”
Ola App has also received a major update that will include larger photos of cab drivers to allow customers to verify their authenticity. To curb driver impersonation, Ola will initiate offline audit checks at transport hubs including airports, railway stations and bus stands. The trained audit team will not only authenticate driver partners but also inspect the state of the car. Having begun the initiative at Hyderabad and Bangalore airports, offline audit checks will be rolled out to more transport hubs across India in a phased manner.