After Uber rape in Delhi, Ola plans ‘by women, for women’ cabs

MUMBAI: In an attempt to address the mounting safety concerns of women riders across the country, Olacabs is in the process of launching a "by women, for women" line of taxis soon. This comes in the aftermath of the horrific rape of a young Delhi girl by an Uber driver leading to the ban of tech-backed taxi aggregators in some parts of the country.

Cab services with only women drivers including the likes of G cabs, Priyadarshini taxis and Viira cabs have been operational for the past few years but have struggled to scale up in size. While millions of dollars have been pumped in by investors like Japan's Softbank into new-age cab aggregators like Ola, the women-only cab companies have found it tough going due to lack of funding.

The Delhi rape which took place about a week ago gave rise to demands of having more woman-driven taxis across the country.

Ola currently has around 50-100 women drivers on its platform but to add up numbers of female drivers has held talks with non-profit organizations, sources said.

Delhi, Hyderabad and Karnataka have banned services of the San Francisco-based taxi-hailing smartphone app Uber along with other cab aggregators till they get their drivers, who possess tourist permits, thoroughly verified. The supply of drivers on the roads across cities for most of these tech-backed taxi players has come down dramatically during the past week.

Sources close to the development told TOI along with introducing a new category of woman-driven cabs, the Bengaluru-based Ola was also in the midst of verifying details of its 50,000 drivers using Aadhaar biometric recognition along with the Unique Identification Authority of India ( UIDAI).

When contacted by TOI, an Ola spokesperson offered no comments on the launch of the new category catering specifically to women commuters. However, a company spokesperson said, " We are pro-actively getting GPS devices fitted in every car in addition to the phone based GPS device we already have. We have also initiated thorough background verification checks for every driver on the platform and are working with local police authorities to complete this very soon."