Over one lakh office-goers from the city and parts of the State are taking to carpooling. Ballpark estimates show that the two largest carpooling apps that cater to the corporate sector here — sRide and Quick Ride — have 80,000 users each.
In Chennai, more and more techies are carpooling. Data provided by sRide show employees of TCS, Capgemini, Cognizant, Wipro and Ford as the top five carpoolers. At the national level, Capgemini (40% of employee base), Cognizant (25%), Wipro (20%), TCS (20%) and Infosys (16%) staff are carpooling.
Techies from Old Mahabalipuram Road, a big IT hub in Chennai, attributed five reasons for carpooling taking off – cost savings, safety (especially for women employees), environmental issues (reduces traffic and pollution), networking and convenience (addresses last-mile connectivity issues).
Company incentives
Nitin Chadha, chief operating officer, sRide Carpool, said that carpooling was the only mobility solution that could help reduce carbon footprint and traffic, that too at zero additional cost, and without adding any further infrastructure.
“Current vehicle utilisation in India is 25% (1 out of 4 seats occupied in a car in 90% cases) and we can easily improve it to 75% for peak hours,” he said.
The founder of Quick Ride, K.N.M. Rao, said that carpoolers were offered incentives by companies in the form of preferred parking. He also suggested that the State government and the companies could do more in terms of incentivising the concept of carpooling, given the benefits involved in terms of infrastructure and emissions.
Those into the business of carpooling apps said that they were, on an average, witnessing a growth of 40-60%, in terms of new users joining each month.
Nasdaq-listed Cognizant said that over 42,000 of its employees in Chennai were carpooling. “We have approximately 90,000 carpoolers across India. In just the first six months of 2018, Cognizant reduced 8,164,66 kg. of carbon emissions because of carpooling,” said Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, executive director-India, Cognizant.
At Infosys, Chennai, employees carpool for long-distance rides too. “During the festive season, it is very difficult to get train or bus tickets, so many of us carpool [to places like Madurai, Coimbatore and Tiruchi] during these times,” said one of the employees, who wished to remain anonymous.
Special parking space
Richard Lobo, HR head and executive vice-president, Infosys, said, “We specially reserve parking space for carpool vehicles. This is especially beneficial when we are short of space.”
Dayakar Reddy, executive vice-president and head-shared services, India & APAC, Capgemini, said that since the launch of the carpooling initiative in March 2017, employees had collectively carpooled 5 million plus kilometres, saving approximately 1,000 tons in carbon dioxide emissions. Capgemini, Chennai, sees 40% of its employees in the city carpooling.