Launched by SoftBank-backed Juspay, it is already undertaking an average of 30,000 auto rides a day, growing at 100% month on month, as per publicly available data.
Ola and Uber, which have been in the market for several years, have been doing between 140,000 and 150,000 autorickshaw rides each on a daily basis, as per market estimates.
The no-commission, no-surge-pricing modelled Namma Yatri plans to launch the service in six other cities pan India after Kochi and Bengaluru, officials said. Firms such as Paytm, which are on the ONDC platform already, are also planning to offer Namma Yatri as a mobility option apart from other travel apps.
“Namma Yatri expects to cross one lakh rides per day in Q3,” Juspay founder and chief executive Vimal Kumar told ET.
“We are exploring a model where we provide tech and the local government, entrepreneurs or drivers take up and run the operations and marketing. With this model, we believe we can cover not just metros but other cities too,” Kumar said.
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Factors like lesser waiting time, zero-percent cancellation and absence of surge pricing will buoy Namma Yatri’s growth further, said Redseer Strategy Consultants director Saurav Chachan, while pointing out that the auto rickshaw-ride market was a price sensitive one compared with four-wheeled cabs.
ETtech“The major growth factor in the mobility sector is the growth of the supply base, in this case, the growth of the driver base,” he said. “If this corresponds with demand, it will see further growth.”
Sources said Paytm would be the first buyer app to offer Namma Yatri as a mobility option along with other major buyer apps.
Other travel apps onboarding on to ONDC as buyer apps will also offer Namma Yatri.
Nitin Nair, senior vice president for travel, transportation and mobility at ONDC, told ET: “Several apps have shown interest in mobility and offering Namma Yatri on their apps. We should have at least one buyer app in the coming weeks offering Namma Yatri to be live in Bengaluru. Customers will also be able to book rides soon on other buyer apps. There are at least four or five such apps that will go live in the next three months.”
Industry sources said total auto rides undertaken by Ola, Uber and Rapido together in Bengaluru were about 360,000-370,000 per day. At an average of 30,000 rides per day, Namma Yatri has already cornered about 8% of the market share, they said.
Rudramurthy, president of the Auto Rickshaw Drivers’ Union in Bengaluru, told ET: “While Ola and Uber show different costs for a trip to the customer and the driver, in Namma Yatri, the entire cost of the trip paid by the customer goes to the driver with no commission deducted. Apart from the Rs 20 or Rs 30 for software maintenance, we don’t pay anything to Namma Yatri. There is no cancellation charge except for a pickup fare of Rs 10 for the consumer.”
Rudramurthy said that out of the more than 55,000 registered drivers, only 10,000-11,000 are active because the demand is low.
Ola, Uber and Rapido did not respond to ET’s request for comment till press time Wednesday.
Cost optimisation
Cost optimisation has been one of the key focus areas for Namma Yatri. “We have been working on cloud cost optimisation and migrating to Open Street Maps to reduce map cost,” Juspay’s Kumar said.
It chose not to give offers or discounts, thus helping optimise on marketing and operations cost, he said. “We are looking at reducing the cost per ride as minimal as possible to have sustained growth … While the current operational costs are covered by Juspay, we are looking at collecting a minimal subscription fee from the drivers soon,” he said.
Asked why none of the 12 buyer apps (customer-facing apps) on ONDC offered Namma Yatri, despite its integration with the network last November, Kumar said: “ONDC buyer apps are in the retail domains such as grocery, food and beverages, fashion, electronics and so on. Namma Yatri and Yatri (in Kochi) are the initial ONDC mobility apps. There is interest from other ONDC buyer apps to offer Namma Yatri rides and we are providing customisable micro-apps to facilitate this. You can expect some apps offering Namma Yatri rides in the coming months.”
On the company’s entry into the mobility business from payments, Kumar said Juspay has volunteered for ecosystem initiatives that could potentially become digital public infrastructure.
“We built the reference app for UPI BHIM for NPCI which was a catalyst in the massive growth and adoption of UPI. We have also built a reference app for the open credit network- OCEN (Open Credit Enablement Network),” he said. “Similarly, we have been working on the open mobility protocol- Beckn for the last three years, first building it for Kochi (Yatri App) and now Namma Yatri for Bengaluru.”
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