Cab-hailing service Uber today announced the completion of 500 million trips in its four-year journey in India, marking a double-digit growth in the country, and almost 2.5 times year-on-year growth as of June 2017.
With over five million weekly active riders in the country, India continues to be one of the biggest markets for Uber, outside the US. Moving forward, Uber is more focused than ever before on building features for riders and drivers that will help the company get to the next five hundred million. In four years, Uber expanded its service to 29 cities across the country.
The company has now started tackling an even greater challenge: reducing congestion and pollution in cities by getting more people into fewer cars. Launched in Bengaluru in September 2015, uberPOOL is now available in Delhi Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai and Pune. Today, over 25 per cent of Uber rides are taken on uberPOOL. This has resulted in saving over 480,00,000 kms, which equals to 62 trips to the moon and back; 23,00,000 litres of fuel saved and prevented the emission of over 53,00,000 kgs of CO2, that would have otherwise required 4500 acres of forest a year to remove.
The company also launched UberSHAAN that aims to create one million livelihood opportunities as micro-entrepreneurs in India by 2018.
In line with the commitment to invest in India, Uber launched Asia’s first Engineering Centre in Bengaluru in January 2016. With over 100 engineers spread across Bengaluru and Hyderabad, several India-first initiatives like uberDOST, Emergency Button, Cash and Dial an Uber have also been launched in countries around the world.
In 2015, Uber also set up a CoE in Hyderabad, with nearly 400 employees who focus on providing the best customer support to our riders and driver partners, including a dedicated Incident Response Team that manages critical incidents.
