India Today Karnataka Roundtable 2023Created 60 lakh jobs in 8 years, says Rapido co-founder Pavan Guntupalli

By India Today Business DeskPopular online bike taxi service Rapido’s co-founder Pavan Guntupalli said creating impact at scale is what has driven him throughout his entrepreneurial journey. With Rapido, he has been able to achieve this by creating 60 lakh jobs in the past eight years.

Speaking at a session during the India Today Karnataka Roundtable 2023, Guntupalli said, “I wanted to do something that could impact hundreds of millions of people,” he said, adding that this led to the inception of Rapido.

Guntupalli said what makes Rapido different from other competitors is that it made sure “this opportunity is accessible to anybody and everybody in the country who has a bike and time”. In contrast, the rest of the players in the bike taxi segment just wanted to create and run a business, said the Rapido co-founder.

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“I realised that the true impact of bike taxi is decentralisation of jobs, which is one of the major problems this country faces as of now,” Guntupalli said. He pointed out that there is a lack of access to opportunity in many small cities and towns across the country.

“If these people want a better life, they have no other option but to migrate to big cities,” he added.

According to him, the way to deal with this problem is to create jobs right in their hometowns. “We call its decentralisation of jobs. Take jobs, not bring people to where the jobs are. And that is what we have done with bike taxis.

“As of today, we have created almost 60 lakh jobs over the course of 8 years and every month we are creating 1.5 lakh new jobs,” he said.

On safety issues and recent pushbacks against bike taxis, Guntupalli said the perception that motorcycles are not safe is not true. “It’s usually not that the bike is not safe, it’s the way you drive a vehicle. That determines safety,” he said.

He also said that Rapido dealt with the safety issue by becoming the first bike taxi company to come out with rideshare insurance. “If anything happens to you during the ride, the ride is insured,” he said.

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While insurance is a post-event measure, Rapido has also put in place a lot of precautionary measures to ensure the safety of customers, including ride tracking.

“Right from the way your captain (Rapido calls its riders Captains) drives to the way he takes a steep turn to the way he brakes, we track everything. We have a telematics team,” he said. In addition, all customer feedback is taken seriously at Rapido.

On whether Rapido will be encouraging women riders, Guntupalli shared an anecdote about a woman from Guwahati, who turned to Rapido for employment after losing her husband during the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, she supports her child’s studies at Cambridge University through her employment at Rapido.

“For me, these are not just stories, these are aspirations of small-town people. He stressed that generating employment in small towns is equally important if India wants to be an economic superpower.

Rapido, which is currently clocking an average of 1 million rides a day, sees 50 per cent of these in tier-2 and tier-3 cities and smaller towns. “We are everywhere, right from the northeast corners of the country to the southwest corners of the country,” he said.

“With the penetration of the internet in all these small towns, all a person needs to do is just download the app, go through the background verification process and start earning. The best part is that the job is flexible,” Guntupalli said.

In conclusion, Pavan Guntupalli said that the scale that they have achieved is still just the “tip of the iceberg” and indicated that he remains committed to expanding the business to create meaningful impact on the society and the economy.

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