The Green Mile

Bike-sharing for short rides, especially with e-scooters, could solve the mobility fix as well as reduce pollution and traffic congestion

- Harichandan Arakali

Micro mobility is the fancy new phrase for the short hops that people make every day. A clutch of startups is looking to cash in on the trend and bring to India modern first- and last-mile commute solutions, while marrying it with the quest for cleaner cities.

Bengaluru-based ventures such as Bounce and Yulu Bikes are trying out models to offer ride-sharing on two-wheelers as well as a sustainable alternative to private transport. With their focus on electric scooters as the vehicle for the future, they could solve one of the biggest sore points of an urban life—pollution. Vogo Automotive in Bengaluru and Gurugram’s Mobycy are some of the other startups working in this sector.

The viability of Indian bike-sharing startups can be gauged from the fact that they raised around $138 million in funding in 2018, compared with $2 million in 2016, say media reports, citing data from Tracxn. “We believe that mobility is really broken in India, and there’s a smarter way of fixing it,” says HR Vivekananda, co-founder and CEO of Bounce. “What we are enabling is pickup-anywhere, dropanywhere… we call it ‘your bike, everywhere’.”

For now, Bounce, mostly offers petrol-driven scooters, but Vivekananda foresees their electric scooter fleet to grow significantly. At present, the Bengaluru venture, started in 2017, has about 4,600 petrol scooters and some 350 e-scooters.