If you are reading this blog, it’s likely that you live in one of India’s metros. If so, it’s more likely that your daily commute to work takes about 30-45 minutes, you spend anything between 2000-5000 Rs every month on fare or fuel, your office travelogue is a daily saga of minor accidents, road rages and near misses, and when you reach office for work, your blood pressure & pulse rate is higher than normal. And if that’s true, I’m sure that at some point in time, you would have thought of carpools but didn’t know how or where to start.
While our political masters don’t seem too perturbed about this, a Delhi based startup believes that carpools are an idea, whose time has come in India. It wants to make local carpools a habit amongst commuters in India. And accordingly, it has launched IndiMoto, India’s first carpooling website, where users can find carpools as viable alternatives to private or public transport. Users can start their own carpool by posting a free ad or they can search other’s carpool ads according to city, area and pin code, all for free. There is also a privacy option where users can hide personal information and manage responses to their carpool ads via the online mailbox itself. This is a useful feature for women who want a carpool but are hesitant of putting their contact information online.
I think the benefits of carpools are well understood- fuel saving, reduced environmental pollution, decongestion of urban roads and monetary savings. However, there was no public forum for enabling this. IndiMoto has stepped into that void, to try to create a ‘carpool revolution‘ in our overflowing cities. To the creators of the website, goes the credit of identifying a basic public need and using the web as a medium of serving that need.
They have also created a pin-up flyer that can be downloaded from the website and put up on office notice boards, college canteens etc to promote carpooling. Simple but very effective.
It’s hardly surprising that an initiative like IndiMoto is coming out of Delhi. For India’s capital city is a vehicular nightmare- it has more automobiles than the next three metropolitan cities (i.e. Mumbai, Chennai & Kolkata) put together. Truly, necessity is the mother of invention.
IndiMoto is not just a carpooling site; in fact, it is a classifieds site for automobiles. Besides carpools, you can put out local classifieds for buying/selling cars & two wheelers; you can search for garages or car workshops; and auto enthusiasts can get together and form their own auto clubs. So, if you have been planning to start the ‘Lokhandwala Ferrari Addicts’ or the ‘Bangalore pre 1950 vintage car owners club’, IndiMoto is where you should head. The site also has a resources section, where you can get relevant information about the RTO office (vehicle registration & issue of driving licenses) or get tips about car maintenance & performance tuning.
I think the current IndiMoto site is great for a start. I do however think, that going forward, they should improve the site’s look/feel and enhance its usability.
IndiMoto is a good example of the increasing fragmentation of the online space in India into distinct verticals. Very soon, we are going to have separate search engines and classifieds sites for almost all major verticals, the way we have for jobs, marriage, real estate and now, automobiles.
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{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
good idea . i would love to try it . but given my unpredictable work hours i doubt it will be of much help to me . still no harm in giving a shot .
thanks for telling about it
It’s a great idea, works well in the west. While it will really take a while in India to catch up as we don’t have disciplined work hours etc. I think everyone has to go a little out of the way support this movement. It’s a great way to contribute towards countries economy. Recourse optimization.
I’d love to see this grow. By the way, A week back a poll was conducted on Tezaa ( http://www.tezaa.com/view/Would_you_consider_sharing_a_car_CARPOOL_via_sites_like_wwwindimotocom_to_save_money_on_fuel_and_in_the_process_reduce_traffic_congestion_and_reduce_harmful_emmisions) to check if people will like this idea, and at this point of writing the comment atleast 50% people thought it would really work out.
Yes, another great service covered by Ranjan. Ranjan, by the way, you write better reivews than I have read on Techcrunch. Keep it up.
I didn’t realize this earlier, but both the earlier two comments mention the unpredictable/undisplined work timings as an impediment in the way of carpools.
Is there a way that carpools could be made flexible to suit timing factors. Maybe we need another level of innovatve thinking in tackling this issue.
amit
I kind of like carpool mumbai (http://patang.org/projects/carpool4/) more than indiapool and Siddarth(http://www.patang.org/blog/) had released it long before indimoto website came up. His effort is more grassroot kind of approach and has really taken it up as a cause.( I heard he even sold his car). I had also written about carpool mumbai a while ago. I feel indimoto has gained a lot prominence because it is spent some good effort in marketing in the mainstream marketing channels.
http://rajan.wordpress.com/2005/09/11/social-coordination-machines/
While I am writing this comment it struck me how much of mainstream media versus non mainstream media is useful/helpful as on today to spread the word in India. Here we have a site carpool which existed/floated solely on blogs & barcamps and another is indimoto which got articles published in economic times and ToI etc and indimoto still gets a lot more attention around it. I am not complaining
but just reflecting on it and trying to get a sense of the dynamics.
A few days ago Kaps,(Sambarmafia Blog author and also a desipundit contributor) had written about Indimoto as well
http://sambharmafia.blogspot.com/2006/06/car-pooling-is-here.html
Cheers,
Rajan
Hi,
I feel Indimoto.com is a great initiative and a great attemt at social engineering for a good cause. Moreover its a free service available to people across India and not just Mumbai like the site Rajan mentioned.
Simran
Hi Rajan,
Thanks for pointing out Patang.org. I recall having seen it earlier but frankly, it didn’t register in my mind while I was writing the post.
I don’t entirely agree with your assertion about Patang. For, it looks like a project that has great academic potential but its too ‘geeky’ for a consumer web service. The GoogleMaps mashup is really, really cool but I think that’s mostly aimed at getting the ‘wow’ out of users. A carpooling site basically needs to get people to talk to each other, and you don’t necessarily need a Google Maps for that.
A consumer web service has to be designed for the least common denominator. And it has to be aligned to the maturity level of users. For the average Indian user (at this stage of the internet’s evolution in India), Patang.org is an overkill.
A big thanks to you for initiating this debate. Also, it’ll be great if we can drag Siddharth, Patang’s creator, into this discussion to know his point of view.
regards
Amit Ranjan
Hi Everyone!
Thanks Amit, for the indepth review of Indimoto.com on Webyantra, i am glad that you found the carpool feature as a useful social tool for commuters. I was going through the review and noticed that some of the readers/felow bloggers had posted comment also appreciating the concept while raising some concern about the timing constraints which a carpool puts on one.
Indimoto.com is trying to get the carpoolers in touch, once they share emails/phone numbers only then is it possible for them to sort out the terms and conditions of the pool (timings, monetary aspects etc).
Though everyone would not become a carpooler there are millions who would be able to explore it and gain from it. For eg one could perhaps pool only inthe morning on way to work and come back using some sort of public transport, or people who have fixed timing jobs could get into a pool. So there shall be many who would and many who wouldnt but none the less we feel private transport will only become more expensive (think petrol reaching Rs100/litre!) and the public transport system isnt very convenient in most cities either, so carpooling can be a viable alternative.
I would also like to mention that we have tried to make Indimoto.com as user friendly as possible, we want that even non net savvy individuals are able to make a listing and use the site. Moreover we are also a full fledged auto classifieds site enabling people to trade used cars, bikes, commercial vehicles and auto products and services with ease.
We look forward to your valuable feedback.
Regards
Udit Bhandari
Indimoto.com
Hi Readers!
Indimoto.com was recently featured on CNN IBN, heres the link to the video clip http://www.ibnlive.com/videos/fullbvideo.php?id=14963
We hope the media’s attention helps propogate the carpool concept in India and its many benefits.
Cheers!
Udit Bhandari
Indimoto.com
I think Indimoto.com is a really user friendly site, which allows you to post your Ad withouy spending much time in registration, what more one can search through all postings without registration as well as contact Advertiser by mesging him on the site itself. Gr8 effort.
Yes its really cool to do carpooling through indimoto.com. Great concept, very new to India but i think people are picking it up. I liked the way site has feature to download carpool flyers to put up in office or at colleges. Not only this RTO information provided on the site is quite usefull.
Guys now you can check out the new look of INDIMOTO.
Information in homebusiness the early home all homebusiness com advantage minimal from C.Anderson homebusiness money alignment issues.
I have just seen one more car pooling website that is http://www.poolmycar.in
I have just registered with them…
More than 100 people have benefited from the site already…
Tired of posting your carpool ads on classifieds…Who has the patience to sift through a million posts to find the right carpool. Do You want to just sit back, hit the search button and find the right carpool ?
Search no further…http://www.svasearch.com is your solution. It’s free and is the easiest way to search for rides. Enabling people to pick their orign and destination through a google maps allows for a more intuitive user interfact in the site too…The site also generates automatic alerts if posts similar to yours are found. Your one-stop solution
More than 100 people have benefited from the site already…
Tired of posting your carpool ads on classifieds…Who has the patience to sift through a million posts to find the right carpool. Do You want to just sit back, hit the search button and find the right carpool ?
Search no further…svasearch.com is your solution. It’s free and is the easiest way to search for rides. Enabling people to pick their orign and destination through a google maps allows for a more intuitive user interfact in the site too…The site also generates automatic alerts if posts similar to yours are found. Your one-stop solution
Friends.. I just registered on poolmycar.in . This looks like best car pool websit on net… it offers corporate car pooling with emp code verification… cool yaar…. many websites are coming up with these car pooling concepts… this is good… may be we will save our environment…
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