Karnataka 2013: OlaCabs celebrates democracy, refunds passengers-cum-voters

New Delhi: If you are among the lazy lot who would rather sit in the cool environs of your office or home than go out and vote – OlaCabs is giving you a good reason to be a conscientious citizen: a free ride to the polling booth.

While polling in Karnataka comes to a close, Bangaloreans who used the cab service and went to vote will receive a full refund of their fare money in the form of OlaMoney, which they can use for travel the next time that they avail of the service. All that the customer needs to do is click a photo of themselves with their inked finger and upload it along with their booking ID on OlaCabs’ Facebook page or tag OlaCabs (@Olacabs) on their Twitter post.

The company promises a full credit of up to Rs250 to the customer into their OlaMoney account within 48 hours.[caption id=“attachment_753655” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Exercising the right to franchise. Reuters[/caption]

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“We as an organisation are great believers in change and we want to see things to move ahead. There are so many people who do so much on a day to day basis to make that positive change happen and we we wanted to help facilitate that kind of change too. We cannot take the entire city or state to vote, but, with whatever we have, we wanted to offer to people so that they can go, vote and make that difference to society,” Anand Subramanian, head Corporate Communications, OlaCabs, told Firstpost.

The finer point of the offer is that it is valid only for completed City Taxi point to point pickup bookings in Bangalore today and not on rental bookings, airport pickups or drops. The fare has to be paid as usual to the driver or through OlaMoney, which will be refunded within 48 hours after the customer has uploaded the picture of themselves and their inked finger. The cap on the fare refund is Rs250 and there is only one refund per customer.

When asked how the company verifies whether a customer has really used its services to go vote or not, in this age of Photoshop and visual technology, Subramanian said that the intention of OlaCabs was not to cross verify whether a customer has indeed used the service.

For Subramanian, customer is king. “We trust our customers implicitly and we are not going to validate if someone has used our service to go to the polling booth or to their friend’s house. If someone has used our service to go somewhere else, but has voted, we are happy to trust them and refund their fare money,” he said. “The idea for us was to incentivise voting and make our customers contribute towards making a change, even as we did the same.”