Bengaluru, September 7 Ola Cabs has crossed pre-covid GMV levels last week and the recovery from second Covid wave is three times faster than the first wave, said founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal in a Twitter post.

Further, 10 million people are reported to have used Ola for the first time ever in FY2021. “As people move, they want to feel safe so they’re switching to personal or shared mobility instead of public transport. Many are moving to Autos taking our Auto business to almost 150 per cemt of pre-covid levels,” Aggarwal added.

The company claims to have vaccinated over 3 lakh drivers and hopes to vaccinate all drivers soon. Further, Ola is said to be onboarding more driver partners, and expanding into new cities and products. In July, Temasek, Warburg Pincus and cofounder Bhavish Aggarwal had invested $500 million in Ola, ahead of the company’s IPO.

Cab-hailing businesses have been harshly impacted by the pandemic. As the earnings dropped, worker unions estimate that over 35,000 drivers have dropped from cab-hailing apps in the past few months.

Aggarwal has also recently announced a complete revamp of Ola Cabs drivers experience in the coming two months. The founder CEO had then said, “We're redoing the @Olacabs driver experience. Will solve many issues around payments, cancellations etc for drivers, and customers. 1-2 months will see significant improvement. Totally focussed on making Ola the most convenient platform for all, especially our driver-partners."

While the issues around driver experience have existed for years now, it is often the Twitter bots and customer care executives that respond to such concerns of both drivers and customers. Agarwal’s Twitter post was one of the rare acknowledgements of the issue by a company founder.

However, the researchers and unions had questioned the timing of this announcement. Since the start of the pandemic, drivers have been asking for loan moratoriums, and income support, but there has been hardly any company response to those demands in the past year.

The drivers and researchers have noted that the many problems of Ola drivers arise from the company’s business model itself which would need drastic changes, such as fixing information asymmetries, enhancing control of drivers over earnings, deciding their trips, payment structures, rate cards, and acknowledging them as employees rather than independent contractors, among others.

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