Why Delhi may bring back app-based carpooling
The Delhi government is planning to allow carpooling to resume by the end of this month on ride-hailing platforms such as Uber, Ola, and Rapido, two people familiar with the matter said.
The move would bring back app-based pooling in a city grappling with worsening congestion and pollution. At the heart of the dispute, experts say, was not private carpooling itself but the absence of a clear state-level framework governing commercial pooling features on ride-hailing platforms.
While the government is keen to restart services as early as this month, carpooling will be classified as a non-commercial shared mobility option. Aggregators have been asked to rebuild in-app pooling features, a process that will take time, given the need for fresh app integrations, backend changes to support concurrent ride-matching, and operational recalibration around routing, pricing and driver incentives, one of the people cited earlier said.
Aggregators were also urged to expand bus and shuttle services, particularly on office routes and high-demand corridors, to ease peak-hour pressure, the person added.
Queries sent to Uber, Ola and Rapido did not elicit a response until press time.
Why was carpooling banned?
App-based carpooling ran into regulatory trouble in 2019 because taxi aggregators in Delhi operate under contract carriage permits, which allow a vehicle to be hired as a whole by a single passenger and do not permit multiple, unrelated pick-ups during a trip. Since carpooling involves picking up and dropping off different passengers along the route, transport authorities held that such services fell outside the scope of these permits.
As a result, aggregators offering carpooling were deemed ineligible for contract carriage licences, said Karun Mehta, partner at Khaitan & Co.
However, multi-stop journeys do not automatically violate the law. If multiple stops are added by the original passenger and the aggregator remains contracted to that single passenger throughout the ride, the service remains permissible, Mehta said.
The deeper issue, lawyers argue, is a legal gap rather than an outright prohibition. Carpooling itself is not inherently a commercial activity. “Genuine cost-sharing by private vehicle owners, without profit or ‘hire or reward’, does not convert a private car into a commercial passenger service,” said Tushar Agarwal, founder and managing partner at C.L.A.P. Juris Advocates & Solicitors.
He added that the friction arose from the lack of a clear state-level aggregator framework for pooling on ride-hailing platforms, and that the government can revive app-based carpooling through executive rules under the Motor Vehicles Act.
Why rethink it now?
The suspension of carpooling in Delhi was ultimately a question of regulatory fit rather than legality—and the same executive route that halted it can be used to restore it.
“The current stoppage in carpooling services in Delhi is because of an executive order. Therefore, a scheme in supersession of the existing Scheme can be introduced by an executive order to revive carpooling in Delhi,” Mehta said.
With congestion tightening its grip on the national capital and vehicular emissions continuing to rise, the Delhi government is increasingly turning to shared mobility to reduce private vehicle use and extract more capacity from existing roads. Unlike episodic pollution sources such as stubble burning, vehicular emissions are a persistent, year-round problem.
Emission inventory studies over the past decade underscore the scale of the challenge. A 2015 Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur study estimated that transport accounted for about 20% of Delhi’s annual PM2.5 pollution. Later assessments by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)-Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI) and System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research (SAFAR) in 2018 put the share much higher—at 39% and 41%, respectively.
Will it help?
Whether the revival of carpooling will meaningfully cut through Delhi’s winter smog remains an open question. Experts say carpooling can ease congestion and lower emissions, but caution that the gains depend on how it is implemented.
“Any push for carpooling must not come at the expense of public transport. If shared rides end up diverting commuters away from buses and the metro, the net environmental gains could be diluted rather than amplified,” said Amit Bhatt, managing director (India) at the International Council on Clean Transportation.
“Even with carpooling, public transport remains significantly more affordable and climate-efficient than cab-based travel, with sharp differences between buses and metros, shared cabs, and single-occupancy rides,” he added.