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Coimbatore
Coimbatore engg students to give homegrown competition for Uber, OLA
December 27, 2017
A mobility management application developed by six graduates from Coimbatore may give global taxi service providers OLA and Uber a tough competition.
The service ‘MyDriverz’, planned to be launched by the start of next year, will currently serve customers and drivers in Coimbatore.
The recent protests by taxi drivers of a private taxi service provider triggered these young graduates to launch a facility that will offer better service to people for a reasonable fare.
“The commission charged by these international players wasn’t actually helping the drivers and also increased the fares for customers. Hence we came up with the idea of a taxi service app that will operate on zero commission. We don’t charge any commission for each ride the driver gets,” said app admin N Varadharajan.
He said they would be charging a fixed amount every month and that would be the only amount drivers would have to pay to the company. “Currently we have fixed the charges at Rs 700 per month for autorickshaws and Rs 1,000 for cabs,” he said.
The drivers will have ID cards and zero balance bank accounts. Besides, the team also plans to get the drivers discounts from departmental stores, he added.
All the six with entrepreneurship dreams are engineering graduates from Hindustan College. “We were working as probationary officers at different banks and always wanted to start business. We planned to have something that would also be service-oriented,” said Varadharajan.
The team started Lakshmi People Service, a service-oriented company, and developed a school management application before which they sell for Rs 15,000 per month to schools. Currently, the software is being used by 120 schools in Salem.
“MyDriverz will have fixed charges and there won’t be any additional peak time charges. For autorickshaws, it will be charges decided by the government and for taxis it will be nominal charges which we arrived at after discussions with drivers,” said Varadharajan. Customers can book service both through the app or phone and the team is now working on launching the service in January.
