Uber has updated its safety regulations in New Delhi to try persuading local authorities to lift a ban on the taxi app handed down after a woman was raped by an Uber driver earlier this month.
The company said this weekend that it will verify all of its Indian drivers with police and run independent verification on their documents and carry out independent background checks. Uber is also planning on introducing an incident response team and a new safety feature called "ShareMyETA" for its app.
The feature allows users to send their trip details to a contact, including GPS tracking and the driver's photo and name.
"The safety of our riders and drivers is the highest priority for us, not only for the rides we enable in New Delhi and across India, but also for the 1+ million trips we are facilitating around the world every day," said Uber Dehli's head of marketing Saad Ahmed, according to an Uber blog.
"Features such as the Enhanced ShareMyETA and safety specialist teams like Incident Response Team are being rolled out first in India," Ahmed added. "We are working on many more technology enhancements and partnerships and continue to innovate and focus on safety."
Facebook engineer Sriram Krishnan argued that the issues the company faced in the country were tougher to solve than they appear.
"This has been happening for a long time now and India has been grappling with some hard social/cultural questions on why it has been unable to stop this," said Krishnan according to Medium.com. "This is why a lot of us tell women travelling to India to be much more aware of their surroundings, the social calculus you employ when you do something as trivial as jumping into a cab or asking a stranger for a favor isn't the same in every part of the world."
When it comes to Uber's initial safety measures, Krishnan said that "anyone who has spent any amount of time in India would know that background checks just don't work and a certificate from the cops is just paperwork. How do you actually protect your riders in these parts of the world by going above and beyond what law enforcement can do?"
Uber's improved safety procedures could be the end of their troubles in India, but it faces separate claims of unlawful behavior from the head of the country's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India.
The bank is willing to work with Uber in order to "try and solve" its issues.
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