Smart and green transportation in New Town got a boost with an electric vehicle charging hub being inaugurated in the basement parking lot of Axis Mall last Friday. And joining the team of drivers of the all-electric app car service were more women who have recently received special training to drive e-vehicles.
The hub, run by Snap-E Cabs and Jio-bp, has 125 charging stations and 15 fast charging ones capable of charging two vehicles at a time. The normal ones take seven to seven and half hours to charge a car while the fast-charge ones take about an hour to an hour and half,” said Mayank Bindal, one of the two co-founders of Snap-E Cabs.
The company parks its fleet of Xpres-T EV sedans and Citroen eC-3 hatchbacks here which are used mainly for night transportation of the employees of Tata Consultancy Services from its offices nearby.
“We run about 600 vehicles across the city and operate about 700 charging stations. We have hubs in the airport area, in Sector V, and two in Kidderpore and in Patuli. This is our first in New Town,” said Jaydip Mukherjee, the other co-founder.
A fast-charging station which can charge two e-vehicles at a time.
The hub was inaugurated by British high commissioner Alex Ellis, who was accompanied by deputy high commissioner Andrew Fleming. He was taken for a ride in an electric cab by Maniktala resident Manjushri Saha, who is among the 30 women drivers to undergo training.
“We have a module to empower women drivers belonging to challenging social and economic backgrounds which was launched by the department of technical education, training and skill development, government of West Bengal, supported by the UK-India Accelerating Smart Power and Renewable Energy (Aspire) programme. We started with training 15 female drivers. Now another 30 have been trained. We teach them both driving and the rudiments of maintenance and repair,” said Bindal, adding that the target was to raise the female fleet strength to 100 within the next three months.
“It is great to see the impact of UK-India collaboration with the West Bengal government on EV skills for women and the commercial partnership between Snap-E and Jio-bp on one of the largest EV charging infrastructure hubs in New Town. These partnerships are contributing towards a netzero future and creating new green jobs,” said Ellis.
“These are gearless cars. We get a lot of airport bookings. Our shift is from 9am to 5pm, so we can return the cab to the garage by 6pm,” said Majushri.
“An NGO called Azad Foundation scouted the prospective women drivers for us. Most of our passenger bookings come from the Salt Lake-New Town belt,” said a Snap-E official, pointing out that unlike app cab aggregators like Ola or Uber, their vehicles and charging infrastructure were company-owned. “This is how we can maintain zero-cancellation policy for drivers.”