Uber updates safety regulations in attempt to get New Delhi ban lifted
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Version 0 of 1. Taxi app Uber has updated its safety regulations in New Delhi in an attempt to persuade the local authorities to left a ban handed down after a woman was reportedly raped by an Uber driver in early December. The company says it will reverify all its Indian drivers with the police, and carry out independent verification of their documents and independent background checks. It is also introducing a dedicated incident response team, and a new safety feature called “ShareMyETA” for its app. The button lets users send their complete trip details to a contact, including live GPS tracking and the driver’s name and photo. “The safety of our riders and drivers is the highest priority for us,” says Uber Dehli’s head of marketing Saad Ahmed, “not only for the rides we enable in New Delhi and across India, but also for the 1+ million trips we are facilitating around the world every day. “Features such as the Enhanced ShareMyETA and safety specialist teams like Incident Response Team are being rolled out first in India,” Ahmed continued. “We are working on many more technology enhancements and partnerships and continue to innovate and focus on safety.” The company touts its new background checks as “going above and beyond required government verification”. It will be paying “local and global experts to evaluate the most effective background screening solution across India”, and says that “pilot programmes are already running in select cities, including Delhi”. Writing shortly after Uber suspended its services in Delhi, Facebook engineer Sriram Krishnan argued that the problems the company faced in the country were harder to solve than they seem. “This has been happening for a long time now and India has been grappling with some hard social/cultural questions on why it has been unable to stop this,” Krishnan said. “This is why a lot of us tell women travelling to India to be much more aware of their surroundings — the social calculus you employ when you do something as trivial as jumping into a cab or asking a stranger for a favour isn’t the same in every part of the world.” As for Uber’s initial safety measures, “anyone who has spent any amount of time in India would know that background checks just don’t work and a certificate from the cops is just paperwork. How do you actually protect your riders in these parts of the world by going above and beyond what law enforcement can do? “Someone suggested that Uber adopt a ‘more Indian way’ of background checking by asking a few neighbours of each driver — as silly as it sounds, a crazy, unscaleable, localised approach like this might yield way better results.” Uber is now petitioning the Delhi local government to lift the ban it imposed in the wake of the attack in early December. The company has complied with the ban on its services, a somewhat different tack from the attitude it has taken in cities such as Madrid and Frankfurt where the company breezed through regulatory difficulties without stopping its service. Improved safety procedures may not be the end of the company’s troubles in India, however. The company now faces separate claims of unlawful behaviour from the head of the country’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India. Raghuram Rajan, the bank’s governor, told Indian news channel NDTV that Uber was “using a way of bypassing our regulations to conduct transactions overseas which were in violation” of the country’s currency controls. India will not tolerate such violations, “no matter who you are”, he added. “If we are a country that is going to turn a blind eye to a violation of regulation,” Rajan said, “then we don’t have rule of law.” But the bank is “willing to work” with Uber “to try and solve” its problems. “We want to encourage” e-commerce, he concluded. “We certainly have to recognise new technologies as they come and make adjustments to the fact they operate in a different fashion,” said Rajan. “We have some solutions coming.” |