Non-Discrimination

Our commitment

This is ground transport, and it puts two people who did not choose each other into one vehicle, often for hours and sometimes overnight. A customer who books a trip, especially one travelling alone, is trusting a driver she has never met. A driver is trusting that the passenger assigned to him will be treated fairly in return, by us and by the terms of the trip itself. Neither should have to wonder whether that trust depends on who they are. That is why this policy exists.

We serve every customer who books with us, and we recruit, engage and promote anyone who can do the job, on whether the job is done and not on who they are. This governs how we take an enquiry, confirm a booking, price a trip, assign a driver, and hire, engage or promote anyone who works for us. It applies the same way whether the decision is being made by an office executive taking a call, a dispatcher assigning a vehicle, or a driver at the wheel.

The characteristics this policy covers

This policy protects you against being refused, downgraded or treated worse because of:

• religion
• race
• caste
• sex
• gender identity
• sexual orientation
• place of birth
• language
• disability
• age
• marital status
• pregnancy

This list is broad because the grounds behind it are broad. Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution of India guarantee equality before the law and prohibit discrimination on several of these grounds by name; the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 and the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 extend that guarantee to disability and gender identity in terms that apply directly to a service business like ours. We have not trimmed the list down to the narrowest reading a court would accept of us. If a characteristic has no bearing on whether we can get you to where you are going, safely and on time, it has no bearing on whether or how we serve you.

Customers

We do not refuse your enquiry or your booking, put you in a lesser vehicle than the one you booked, charge you more than the published or quoted rate, or treat you with less courtesy than any other customer, on any of the grounds set out above. The fare, the vehicle class and the standard of conduct are the same for every customer booking the same trip.

In practice this covers the plain refusal, an enquiry that goes unanswered or a booking that becomes suddenly unavailable once we know who is travelling, and it covers quieter forms too. A driver who turns up in an older or smaller vehicle than the class you paid for, once he sees who is getting in. A fare that rises between the phone call and the pick-up for no reason connected to the trip itself. A driver who is short with you, unwilling to help with luggage, or reluctant to make a short stop he would make without a second thought for any other passenger. Any one of these can have an innocent explanation on its own. What makes it discrimination is a pattern: it happens to some passengers and not others, and the difference tracks who they are rather than anything about the trip.

If any of this happens to you, tell us. We look into every report ourselves rather than treating a driver’s account as the end of the matter, we correct the fare or the service failure where one occurred, and where a driver is found to have refused or degraded service on a protected ground, the consequence is the one set out in Drivers may not refuse a passenger, below: removal from our panel, not a warning. How to report discrimination, further down this page, is the fastest way to reach us.

Disability

Under Section 3 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, a person with a disability is not to be denied a service, charged more for it, or given a lesser standard of it, on the ground of that disability, and this applies fully to how we take a booking and how a trip is carried out. We do not charge extra because boarding takes longer, because a wheelchair needs to be folded and stowed, or because a driver needs a few extra minutes at pick-up to help you in. We do not ask why you need what you need, and we do not make travelling with a companion a condition of being served. A service animal or an assistance dog travels with you as a matter of course, not as a request that has to be argued for each time.

Our specific arrangements, a wheelchair-accessible vehicle where one is available, how far ahead to tell us what you need, and what a driver is briefed to do before he arrives, are set out in full at /accessibility, which this page defers to rather than repeats.

Transgender travellers

We address you by the name and the gender recorded on your booking or your travel document, not by assumption, by appearance, or by a driver’s own guess. This matters in two ways that both come down to being treated correctly. At pick-up, a driver calling out the wrong name or the wrong title in front of your family, your colleagues, or a hotel lobby causes a moment of embarrassment that is entirely avoidable, and we brief drivers to prevent it. Where an identity check genuinely matters, at an airport gate, a toll checkpoint, or a corporate visitor desk, what is checked is whether the name on your booking matches the name on your document, exactly as it would be for any other passenger. Nobody on our side asks you to explain, justify or discuss your gender identity as a condition of being served.

Section 3 of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 prohibits denying a transgender person access to a service, or giving a lesser standard of it, on that ground, and this applies to every enquiry, booking, pick-up and drop we handle, from the first phone call to the fare on the invoice.

Employees, drivers and vendors

The same standard applies to how we recruit, engage, pay and progress anyone who works for us: an employee in the office, a driver on our panel, or a vendor we contract for a vehicle, a service or a supply. A driver joins our panel on the strength of his licence, his driving record and his conduct with a passenger, checked the same way for every applicant, not on his religion, his caste, his community or where he is from. A vendor is selected on the vehicle, the price and the terms on offer, not on who owns or runs the business supplying it. Pay for the same class of work is the same regardless of who is doing it, and where a driver, an office hand or a vendor is given more responsibility over time, a senior route, a dispatch role, a larger contract, that is decided on performance, reliability and tenure, and on nothing else.

Drivers may not refuse a passenger

No fare, seat, route or timing is a legitimate reason to turn away a passenger once it is tied to who that passenger is. A driver who suddenly finds a fault with the vehicle, invents a fare, or names a route he "does not do", once he sees who is getting in, is refusing on the ground, whatever reason he gives at the time. The same applies to a driver who accepts the booking and then makes the trip itself worse: taking a longer route than the one needed, declining a reasonable stop he would make without question for any other passenger, or being deliberately unhelpful with luggage or directions. What identifies a refusal of this kind is rarely the stated reason. It is the timing: a genuine mechanical fault, a genuine scheduling conflict or a genuine route restriction exists before a driver knows who the passenger is, not after he has seen them.

We do not refuse or degrade service on the ground of religion, race, caste, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, place of birth, language, disability, age, marital status or pregnancy. A driver who refuses a passenger on any such ground is removed from duty immediately and permanently from our panel.

This is not a system of warnings. One confirmed refusal on a protected ground ends that driver’s place on our panel, because a passenger who has already been turned away once has no way of knowing whether it will happen again, and we are not willing to ask her to find out.

How to report discrimination

If you believe you were refused, downgraded, charged more, or treated worse than another customer on any of the grounds set out above, whether by us directly or by a driver on our panel, tell us. Report it through /grievance-redressal, which names who to write to, what to include, and how fast we respond: every complaint is acknowledged within 24 hours and looked into within 15 days, and never later than one month.

We do not treat a driver’s account of what happened as the end of the matter. Where a report under this policy is upheld, we correct whatever went wrong, the fare, the vehicle, or the way you were treated, and we act on the driver as set out in Drivers may not refuse a passenger, above. Raising a genuine complaint under this policy does not affect any booking you have with us, now or in future.

A genuine safety refusal is not discrimination

A refusal made on a genuine safety ground is not covered by this policy: a passenger who is visibly intoxicated and a risk to themselves or others, a load that would breach the vehicle’s permit, or an instruction that would require the driver to breach the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988. These are judgments about the situation in front of the driver, not about the person, and in some cases he is required by law to make them.

A driver who declines to carry a passenger who is visibly intoxicated and unsteady on his feet, on the reasonable view that he is a danger to himself in a moving vehicle, is making a safety judgment. The same driver would decline the same passenger regardless of his religion, his caste or anything else about him, because the reason has nothing to do with who the passenger is and everything to do with his condition at that moment. That is not discrimination, and this policy does not reach it.

Contrast that with a driver who refuses a passenger because of religion, caste, gender identity or any other ground this policy covers, and only afterwards reaches for a safety explanation, one that does not survive being checked against what actually happened. The test is the same one throughout this policy: would the same refusal have been made of any passenger, in the same situation, regardless of who they are? If the honest answer is no, the refusal is discrimination, whatever explanation is offered for it at the time.