ONE year after a woman in her mid-20s was raped by an Uber driver in New Delhi, the cab-aggregator company inked a series of Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) with the government of India as well as many states, promising employment to welfare schemes. However, most of those proposals have not seen the light of the day even after so many years, an investigation by The Indian Express has revealed.
The news publication has said that internal records of Uber officials, including emails, documents and text messages that were obtained by The Guardian and probed by the Indian daily with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists showed that this was a strategic move to control the damage caused by the rape incident and the subsequent ban of Uber in Delhi.
The horrific incident happened on December 5, 2014, which not only resulted in Uber's ban in India's capital but also the exit of Travis Kalanick, the co-founder of the company and its former chief executive officer.
The driver, Shiv Kumar Yadav, was convicted by a Delhi court and is currently serving life imprisonment.
The news is back in the headlines, thanks to data from The Uber Files -- which after investigation by some top journalists revealed that the cab-aggregator company's first response to the incident was to shift the blame on the Indian system -- "flawed background checks".
Exchanges of emails also revealed that the company was desperate for damage control so that its reputation in other global markets was not compromised.
According to The Indian Express, records show that on April 9, 2015, Jordan Condo, then head of Uber's public policy, referred to the welfare initiatives of the Indian government such as a Rs 1,000-crore entrepreneurship programme and the Rs 15-crore Atal Innovation Mission and asked his team to use "political capital".
The records also showed that Condo wanted Uber to set up "public-private partnerships with the government and have influence within the government invested in the success of our business”. He also planned to “use this joint program to aggregate third party influencers (NGOs, business influencers etc.) to support Uber”, the data suggested.
Soon after, Uber reached out to various ministries in the Indian government such as social justice and empowerment; electronics and information technology; labour and employment, etc. and even governments of states such as Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Haryana and Telangana. It also entered a pact with the NTR Trust, which is run by the family of N Chandrababu Naidu, a former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh besides pursuing a tie-up with Maruti Suzuki, India's largest car-maker.
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