It might have happened to you too that you were standing on the roadside and trying hard to catch an autorickshaw, but you could not find it. It may also happen that you book an autorickshaw through a ride booking app and it gets canceled later or you face difficulty in making the payment. At the age of 23, three college students have found the solution to all these problems and have made not only auto rickshaw rides but also sharing auto journeys easier for people.
Jaishankar, Amaal Leone and Ashfaq Jalal, students of a college in Chennai, developed two apps. One app developed for autorickshaw passengers and one app for autorickshaw drivers. This also benefited those customers who use autorickshaws for sharing.
Jaishankar used to take a sharing auto every day to go to his classes, but sometimes he got it and sometimes not. At times, there was not enough space to sit in it. He wanted a solution to this problem. Therefore he decided to track the sharing auto. His two friends helped him in this work. He developed two apps named QPo, one for drivers and the other for shareriders.
These apps work to track sharing autos, so that passengers know the locations of their sharing autos. With this, they can manage their travel time and also make a plan for how long to wait.
According to a news in 'The Better India', to make his app successful, Jaishankar gradually took it to 5 lakh people who take the help of sharing auto for daily commute. Sharing autos keep people's journey light on the pocket and also provide last mile connectivity.
7 to 9 passengers can travel in a sharing auto. Apart from this, one advantage is that a person can board it from wherever he wants and can get down from wherever he wants. Therefore, when people got the facility to track sharing autorickshaw on this app, people immediately took it. In sharing auto, you can cover a distance of more than 20 km at a cost of less than Rs 100.
Jaishankar says that he first shared his idea with Ashfaq. In India, there are solutions like Uber and Ola for cabs, and apps like Shuttle and Chalo for buses. In such a situation, there was no special app for auto. Jaishankar said that he developed the QPo Shareride app in just 5 months. This is the short form of 'Quick Ah Po', which means 'quick walk' in Tamil language.
While Jaishankar worked on autorickshaw tracking in developing this app, Amal worked on the feature of showing the availability of seats or space in the auto. Ashfaq designed a feature on this app showing the possible routes of the auto.
While this app helped the passengers to commute timely, it also helped in providing fixed income to the autorickshaw drivers.
