Chalo: Bharat on wheels
Tech inclusion in rural bus mobility solutions is creating ripples
How Chalo came into existence
There has been a huge technological schism between rural and urban India for far too long. Chalo is a startup founded in 2014 by Mohit Dubey as an attempt to bridge this gap. Dubey is a serial entrepreneur and had founded Carwale, which is a platform for car classifieds. Carwale is a successful startup even till date. Carwale was sold to a private equity firm and was eventually acquired by CarTrade, market leader for car classifieds at that time.
On one hand, for last decade the world was going bananas over car taxi aggregators such as Ola or Uber. The space emerged as a darling that every investor wants to get along with. But Dubey, who has been quirky throughout his professional career had something else in his mind. He decided to go offroad this time, straight to Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities of rural India. And it was the time to go big in size, hence he decided to switch to buses from cars.
How Chalo solves the problems
The problems with existing bus services in hinterland were multifold. First of all, passengers had to wait hours at the bus stop without any clue of arrival time of next bus. The solution that Dubey came up with was a real-time bus tracking feature in Chalo app which can be accessed by entering the bus code.
The personal car ownership percentage in rural India is very low so is the internet penetration. India has close to 70 crore Internet users with a split of 50:50 for urban and rural. But rural India is catching up fast at 28% CAGR in comparison to 7% CAGR for urban India, thanks to the Jio revolution.
Loose money availability with the bus conductor as a change is another struggle. And because a lot of passengers travel to city for most of their utilities, bus is for daily commute transport. Conductors at times put the onus on passengers to either come up with change or adjust the amount in their upcoming travels. With Chalo’s smart card they can pay the fare online without any worry of change.
Future Scope
The market opportunity is huge for Chalo by all means. The overall daily bus services market size is $20 billion in comparison to $10 billion for cab aggregator services and $5 billion for bike taxis. Despite the infrastructural and behavioural challenges we saw how Chalo is bullish on rural India and decided to onboard Bharat on wheels.
