Holding a BE ­ Instrumentation & Control degree from the Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, Vivek has been in the Travel & Hospitality industry for four years, and has even worked with well-known Thrillophilia and Airbnb, prior to joining Wunder Mobility.

India is encountering fast urbanization, the number of people living in urban areas is increasing rapidly. Domestic migration in search of employment towards urban cities has in-creased drastically in the past decade. This rapid increase in urbanization is putting a lot of stress on the current infrastructure of our Indian urban cities. Even though our State Governments are developing new infrastructure in these cities at a speedy rate to support this growing urbanization our urban cities are still engulfed in an array of problems due to this urbanization. One such issue faced by our urban population is commuting around the city.

Enormous traffic jams, overstressed public transport and high soaring pricing of taxis/cabs have made life hell for office goers. In our capital city of New Delhi, the traveling time from home to office and back comes around to be 2-4 hours daily on an average for an individual.

Diving deeper we realize that the adverse effects of daily traffic snarls are not just restricted to wastage of time but also have an equal financial and environmental impact on urban dwellers. An average Delhite who earns 4.8 lakhs per annum, ends up spending 10-15 percent just on their

daily commute to work. This financial impact is not just at an individual level but our urban cities including New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and others are bearing a cost of $22 billion dollars annually due to this automobile overload. As per the reports our government actually dispensed over Rs.7 crore this year to Delhi Police for traffic management in order to optimize travel impression, installation of CCTV cameras, Intelligent Transport Systems, Public Awareness, Governance, and Financing.

Coming to the environmental and health impact, vehicle emissions from cars/bikes increases the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which undoubtedly increases the risk of several health issues including lung cancer, asthma, heart stroke and other respiratory infections which bears an additional expenditure and even a threat to life.

A single passenger vehicle emits around 4.6 metric tons of CO2 annually. As per the latest emission inventory prepared by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, under the ministry of earth sciences in 2018, carbon emissions from the transportation sector have increased by 40 percent from 2010-2018 in the National Capital Region (NCR).

Next question on our minds is what is the solution?
Community carpooling is our proposed solution which diminishes these problems altogether.

How?
Let's look at some astonishing facts - rather than adding a new car to the road, carpooling effectively reduces the number of cars on the road which if carried out at scale can result in a decrease of 75 percent of traffic congestion from the most gridlocked areas of the city. Not just congestion but also 1,500 or more pounds of the greenhouse emissions can be avoided from the air each year by carpooling only twice a week.

Additionally for car-owners offering rides, carpooling is more about covering their costs which in turn makes carpooling pocket-friendly, convenient and sustainable mode of travel for people looking for a ride to work every day. The pros of carpooling also help an individual to build a healthy network with their colleagues and people in their neighborhood, whom they can carpool to work on a daily basis, while at an enterprise level, carpooling can help business units decrease their expenditure on employee transportation as well as parking facilities. Carpooling also benefits the government at a city level scale by reducing the expenditure on additional infrastructure by utilizing the vehicles already on the road.