Carpooling platform Quickride on Tuesday submitted a formal proposal to Karnataka state transport minister Ramalinga Reddy urging the state government to support carpooling as a measure to combat traffic congestion and vehicular pollution in Bengaluru.
The Transport minister has said the state will work on developing a framework around carpooling, which will allow the services to continue in the city as long as non-commercial vehicles are not being utilised for commercial purposes.
The state minister had offered to meet with representatives of carpooling apps like Quickride, BlaBla Car, Zoom, Rideshare and others after a section of media had on Monday reported that carpooling has been banned in the city, and that a fine of Rs 10,000 could be imposed on such vehicles. Ramalinga Redyy had on Monday clarified in a post on X that carpooling has not been banned and that the requirement is for aggregator platforms to take the necessary permissions required to operate in the city.
Quickride, the only app amongst the host of carpooling service providers in the city to turn up at the meeting held on Tuesday, claimed that it has in its past 8 years of existence, reduced over 5,600 tonne CO2 emmissions through its 1.85 crore plus carpools carried out by 13,00,000 plus IT professionals from the likes of Wipro, Infosys, TCS, IBM, Cognizant Capgemini, HCL and Tech Mahindra in the city. The platform claims to have enabled Wipro to optimise 11% of parking space and help reduce vehicle movement to Manyata Tech Park from over 16,000 to around 13,000.
The platform argued that it does not provide any commercial service on its application where users can monetise carpooling services. Instead, it claims to offer users a point-based reward system that can be exchanged to rotate carpooling activity among a larger group of users, or for redemption on future ride costs.
Quickride charges users a platform fee of 5%. Meanwhile, points earned by a user range from 0-6 points/km.
The platform, in its letter to the transport minister, which was reviewed by FE, also claims to have undertaken certain measures to restrict commercial activity on the app, which include a cap of two rides per day per carpool provider and a restriction on accepting orders that deviate from pre-defined and pre-published routes between IT hubspots.
The platform in its argumentation also noted that on November 2, 2018, Niti Aayog had written a letter to chief secretary, government of Karnataka, suggesting necessary steps to create an ecosystem for propagating carpooling practice in the state.
According to Clause 15 of the Motor Vehicle Aggregators Guidelines 2020 issued by the Union ministry of road transport and highways, “In furtherance of the Central and state governments’ objectives to reduce traffic congestion and automobile pollution, and to effectively utilize assets, non-transport vehicle pooling may be provided by aggregators unless prohibited by the state government. The rationale for such prohibition shall be specified in writing and made accessible on the transport portal of the state government.”
