Those driving big cars leave a bigger carbon footprint, Shuttl co-founder

Short trips that promise comfort and convenience. That was the idea behind Shuttl, the brainchild of IIT graduates Amit Singh and Deepanshu Malviya. Currently, the successful bus aggregator operates on 15 routes in Gurgaon and Noida, catering to thousands of customers. And the journey that began in 2015 now covers eight cities, including Delhi-NCR. “We want to do the same thing better — our focus is on reliability and efficiency,” says Singh, who would like to see more people leave their cars at home.
No learning is ever too much

As human beings, we are constantly looking out for the next big thing. From infrastructure and consumer technology, I moved to Jabong when it was getting started. That was a very different learning experience as most of the people who joined Jabong (a lot of consultants, bankers) wanted to gain e-commerce experience — they did not want a regular job in a big company, they wanted more action in their lives. In two years, Deepanshu and I pioneered a lot of new things at Jabong. There were a number of firsts — including same-day delivery, and open delivery, where you can return if you did not like your purchase. Typically, delivery is the last team you develop but the operations team did very well in Jabong, and it helped me understand the complexity of how to leverage technology.

The argument for public transport

After Deepanshu and I started doing an inter-city bus service, we realised the real problem lies in the cities — people don’t have many options for comfortable public transport. Customers want the comfort of an assured seat, AC and direct route, which makes them shift to cabs instead of public transport. We provide the same comfort with buses. Buses are the most efficient way of moving people in cities with respect to on-the-road surface area per person, carbon footprint, and cost-per-seat per km. We might not be relevant for everyone in the city, because we have a few routes, but we are serving at a fraction of a price-point, which makes Shuttl customer-friendly.

How govts have got it wrong

The government operates with a very different objective; it keeps in mind the lowest-common-denominator approach, while we are catering to the top of the pyramid. The government is catering to the masses, the bigger chunk, blue-collar people looking for transportation and not necessarily a seat. There is no denying that investment has gone into public transport — over Rs 200-Rs 300 crores have been invested in DMRC, in Gurgaon we have Rapid Metro and now, the Gurugaman bus service. Sadly, the government wants to find a solution for the ones at the bottom of the pyramid, but the carbon footprint lies at the top of the pyramid — those who are driving big cars and clogging the roads.

No ‘short route’ to success

A lot of businesses are subsidising to increase their customer base and that’s where the problem starts, because somewhere the customer will have to eventually pay more. It is happening everywhere, in e-commerce and new startups. That’s the challenge we faced at Jabong. The profitability of a business should come from better efficiency. Currently, we are very cognisant of the fact that we should charge customers what we will be charging them in the future. Demand alone is not validation; demand at the right price-point is validation.