Rickshawale.com - Dial-an-Auto Rickshaw Service for Mumbai Commuters

Typical Tuesday morning. You rush out of the house, late to catch your local. You don’t find a rickshaw to take you to the station, or to the destination maybe. When you find one, the driver denies. On your face. You hurl abuses and walk speedily fumed with desperation. The city works by the minute. A minute late and you’ll find yourself explaining yourself to your boss, professor or best friend. Sounds like your Tuesday morning?Won’t anymore. Rickshawale.com is here to take care of hassles of local travelling in Mumbai! In conversation with Abhilasha Dafria for YourStory.in, founder Hemant Jain tells us how he and partner Sandeep Agarwal strive to turn that frown upside down … for good!

Hemant, please introduce yourself and your venture to our readers. What exactly is rickshawale.com and how did you come up with this idea?

I am a Chartered Accountant by profession and prior to starting rickshawale I worked as a Business Head at Reliance Logistics Ltd. I quit my job in mid 2009 and took a break and pursued other interests. During this period I was thinking of starting an activity in Logistics as I had vast experience in this field and thought I could contribute to this industry.

In April 2010, I had a fractured my leg and used crutches to walk. Whenever I wanted to travel, I had to send someone to bring an auto rickshaw to my door step. At that time this thought occurred to me “Why an auto rickshaw is not used like the radio cab?” The whole idea started from this thought and evolved into rickshawale.com

I started working on this concept since May 2010 and it took me 1 year to finalise a low cost tracking option through the GPRS technology and the commercials. The Radio Cab operates on the GPS technology and the equipment is costly, we could not afford to install a costly device into a rickshaw due to security reasons and thus had to develop a system where we could track the driver instead of the rickshaw. Along with the tracking, we had to incorporate the function of passing on fares and the driver accepting the same.

In June 2011, I actually started the formation of the business model and over a cup of tea, discussed this concept with a friend of mine, Sandeep Agarwal, who joined me and the whole project started. We narrowed down the name of the concept after a lot of option to rickshawale.com. The name gives the proper understanding of the project and also a respect to the rickshaw driver.

What were the challenges you faced while starting up? Tell me about your initial hurdles.

The success of rickshawale project is inducting quality drivers, when Sandeep along with me started the process of inducting drivers as members, first 15 days, we could not induct a single driver as member as the driver community could not accept to work under any company or scheme or follow rules and regulations and more over, they could not believe that they would get business through their mobile. It took a lot of convincing.

So how does the revenue model work with the Auto-drivers you work with? Do they have electronic meters or do customers pay in advance?

The driver, after utilising our service for the month, has to pay Rs.999/- as membership charges. The rickshaws presently do not have electronic meters but our mechanical meters are all as per RTO. The customer, after completion of his / her trip, pays fare strictly as per meter plus a service charge of Rs.20/-

Do you also take responsibility of the travel w.r.t passenger safety/ details of the driver, etc? Do you provide any extra facilities to your customers?

We take responsibility as to sending the right driver for pick up and declare all his credentials to the passenger. We have imparted training to drivers of safe driving and passenger safety.

Our driver wishes and welcomes the passenger with a smile when he boards the rickshaw and thanks the passenger when he gets down after paying the fare. And the customers are overwhelmed with these gestures by an auto driver.

Since when are you operational? How big is your team? Are you looking at hiring?

We are operational since 12^th October, 2011. We presently have a team of 15 people. We are planning to hire people in the IT department.

Aren’t you planning to offer services outside Mumbai?

Yes. We are presently operating from Mumbai and are planning to shortly extend our services to nearby Thane and Navi Mumbai. We have received many requests from other cities and are evaluating the options.

We recently have received a Formal request from Pakistan to have a joint venture for the city of Karachi.

How do you market your portal?

We have not indulged or appointed any agency to market our portal, all the activities happening on our portal, Facebook or Twitter is through word of mouth.

How many unique visitors do you have on your website everyday?

We are presently having average 2000 unique visitors every day. In a short span of 2 months we are ranked on the Website ranking in India at 30771 as of 14^th December 2011 (Data as per Alexa.com)

Can you share with us some interesting trends about the market that you are trying to capture? 

Auto rickshaw today is the backbone of any city, irrespective of it being a Metro or a small city. Talking of Mumbai, the trends are encouraging and have a very bright future, to service a population of 1.40 crores people in Mumbai the rickshaw available are only 1.25 lacs. There is a big gap between the demand and supply, this is where rickshawale pitches in and provides quality and timely service to the customers.

We see a large growth in number of customers within the next 3 months.

Are there other players in the market doing similar things? Can you name them? What is your USP?

There are other players who are operating Dial-An-Auto but are on the Rickshaw ownership model. They buy the permits, finance for the rickshaws and keep the driver on their payroll. To name a few Radio Tuk Tuk, Autowale.in, EasyAuto.in.

We are the only players in the market who operate on a completely different model and do not own the rickshaws. We provide fares to the drivers and in turn he pays us a monthly membership fees.

Did you fund-raise to start up? If not, are you looking at getting funded now?

We have raised funds through our internal resources and Unsecured Loans from the Logistics arm of Sandeep.

What are your greatest challenges and how do you prepare to cope with them?

The greatest challenge is getting the right kind and quality drivers. We shall increase our training programs and also the awareness within the driver community.

Where do you see yourself going from here?

Our first target is to reach 1000 rickshaws in Mumbai, then slowly spread out pan India. Our process and technology is scalable.

To book your ride please check out Rickshawale.com and do share your thoughts by leaving a comment here!

- Abhilasha Dafria