Ola cabs on Wednesday terminated a cab driver from the Ola platform for his allegedly misbehaving with a woman passenger and her daughter and threatening her when she question him for taking the wrong route to her destination.
An Ola spokesman told International Business Times - India Edition that "We have terminated the said vehicle and the driver from the Ola platform after reaching out to the customer to take her feedback. We have zero tolerance for this kind of behaviour from drivers-partners registered with us. We have also assured full support on sharing all required information like driver details, GPS coordinates etc., if need be, to help her pursue this. Ola is committed to the safety of its users at all times."
The driver, identified as Praveen, has been accused of stopping the cab at a desolated place and "misbehaving with the woman and her daughter... He even threatened them", the police said. He was arrested and charged under sections 509, 506 and 188 of the Indian Penal Code, The Indian Express reported.
"The driver, Praveen Kumar, was booked for outraging a woman's modesty, threatening and violating a public order," Deputy Commissioner of Police (south-east) Mandeep Randhawa said.
However, he was later released on bail.
The incident took place on Monday night when the woman, a joint-secretary rank officer posted with the railway ministry, booked a cab through Ola app after attending the Diwali Mela in Nizamuddin area.
When she booked the cab she received the message that a man named Arvind Babu will be driving her to her destination. However, she realised that the driver was not the same after boarding the cab with her daughter.
The woman raised an alarm when the driver, Praveen, took a different route to her destination – her residence in Sardar Patel Marg. Instead of taking Lodhi road, the regular route, the driver allegedly took Mathura road, according to The Times of India report.
"At about 8.30 pm, she booked a cab through the App and got the details of a driver, Arvind Babu. A cab driver, who came in his white Wagon-R, picked up the two of them. She asked him to take them to their residence. But after some time, she noticed that he was taking them via a wrong route," police said.
On being asked as to why he was taking the wrong route, Praveen said that he does not know the route.The cab did not even have a GPS. The woman then asked him to call his Ola operative, but the driver called the owner of the cab.
"Fearing that something was amiss, she then asked him to make a call to the OLA customer center and asked him his name. He introduced himself as Praveen. He then made a call to another person, allegedly the owner of the car, who told the woman that he was a senior executive of OLA company," police said.
The driver dropped the woman and her daughter at an isolated place when she called the police. He tried to flee with the car, but the police tracked him down and arrested him.
The incident took place a day before Uber cab driver Shiv Kumar Yadav was sentenced to life for raping a woman passenger in December last year. The incident had taken place in New Delhi.
