On December 5, a woman passenger was allegedly raped by the driver of an app-based cab service in New Delhi. This led to concern among passengers, particularly women, about their safety. Siddhartha Pahwa, CEO at Meru Cabs, speaks to Manavi Kapur about what cab companies can do to make their services safer
How do you train your chauffeurs to ensure a passenger's safety? How do you conduct a proper background check?
Service is the core of our industry and you cannot provide good, effective service unless your staff is adequately trained. Meru has a four-day training programme, where we teach our drivers basics about communication, safe driving, handling technology and how to interact with passengers, especially women, children and the elderly. This is followed by an examination that a driver needs to pass before coming on board. Training drivers once is not enough, so we collate passengers' feedback about our chauffeurs and hold refresher training programmes every six months. These training sessions happen at our academy and we have dedicated team that designs the training modules. Nearly 50 drivers come in for training or refresher courses every day.
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In case of the alleged rape in New Delhi, the GPS tracking was disabled by the driver. How do you ensure that this does not happen with your cabs?
All Meru cabs have fixed GPS devices. This means that they are able to track a cab's location and direction even when the car engine is turned off. Besides this, we have additional technological safeguards for our passengers. If they use the mobile application, they can sound an alarm with the ICE (in case of emergency) button. Our trip tracker feature sends regular updates with exact location and coordinates of the cab to the mobile phone of a passenger's trusted contact.
How are these safety features communicated to your users?
Our intent is not to instil fear in the minds of travellers by telling them that other cab services are unsafe. Instead, we want to create awareness about our safety features. Over 500,000 users have registered with these safety features in the last two years.
After the alleged rape in Delhi, do you sense a crisis of confidence in cab services? How has this affected business?
What happened in Delhi was a very unfortunate incident. We were pioneers in this industry and have only survived because of the fearless travel experience. In fact, nearly 40 per cent of our users are women. We are ensuring that our users know that there are systems in place to keep them safe. There has been no significant change in business, but yes, we have seen a spike in the number of people enrolling for our safety features. We are not taking this opportunity to push ourselves forward just because some other player is under water. Instead, we want to work with industry leaders to ensure that safety standards across the country are raised.
Rape is a social issue and a clean criminal record may not ensure that a chauffeur doesn't become an offender. How do you address this problem?
While our background checks are stringent, no system can be 100 per cent accurate and it is important to understand the problem through a social prism. We need to understand where our chauffeurs are coming from. Most of them are migrant workers, who hail from socially and economically backward families. Here, the question is not of criminality but of value systems. Most of them come with a belief that their actions might go unnoticed.
Our training sessions strive to develop our chauffeurs's value system about large cities and tell them what is right and wrong. For example, we have a special module on how to behave with a woman passenger. We teach them simple things like keeping a one-arm distance at all times, not making eye contact, not making unnecessary conversation and not staring at the passenger in the rear-view mirror. An important tool in this training is the role-play exercise. These make the lessons easy to remember and helps us evaluate them better.
