Is It Time For India To Have The Uber Model Just For Children?

It’s not even slightly easy to be a parent. If they’re working, they have to take care of their career, provide for their family, nurture their children and make sure things get done for them. On top of that, parents might want the best for their kids, so they get them to do multiple extracurricular activities. Guitar lessons. Coaching lessons. Football practice. Tuitions. Who’s going to take them around? Who can drop them off at school? Who’ll bring them back? One would have to stay at home throughout to manage it all.

Unless some startup came in to try to fix the issue. In December 2024, a Bengaluru startup called MetroRide Kids came along to change the way children commute by offering transportation for those aged 5-16. Trust is always an issue for working parents, so could this be something safe, reliable and efficient? Parents care a lot about the safety of their children, so they might be willing to pay a price.

There seem to be some pain points this might be looking to solve. Maybe, school transportation systems or auto-rickshaws that ferry children are overcrowded. Some might see them as unreliable when there’s so much traffic chaos, drunk driving and road accidents in India. It’s said that 30% of kids have witnessed a crash during a commute, while roughly 5% of them were involved in a road crash or a near-miss situation.

How could drivers be stringently monitored? Could there be immediate redressal mechanisms? Who even are these drivers? Maybe, that’s what the startup is looking to solve. The vehicles, which would be EVs, under this startup are said to be equipped with live CCTV monitoring and GPS tracking, along with something called geofencing, which would create a virtual geographic boundary. Plus, there are said to be AI systems to monitor driver behaviour. And there’s something called an RFID card that children would carry that might be scanned when they board or alight the vehicle. That way, parents could stay informed in real-time about how their kids are doing. The cherry on the top might be SOS buttons and a vehicle immobilizer, that parents could remotely use to intervene, if there’s a worst-case scenario that takes place. Cars being controlled remotely? It’s straight out of a Bond movie.

And it could sound expensive, but there are said to be weekly and monthly plans with cost-effective shared rides or if someone is rich enough, personalized private rides. 

All of it sounds really dandy.

It might even be a way to make EVs more familial in India. If people’s kids are using EVs, then it must be for everyone. And if parent communities are strong, more parents would want their kids to be in EVs. The trust networks never fail. That might help with CAC.

Of course, many label the Indian market as “price-sensitive”, so how this plays out might be interesting. Because the startup has to maintain EVs, hire trained and vetted drivers and implement cool technology, this might be slightly premium, unless the idea is to go the deep discount strategy funded by VC money. If this is targeted towards upper-middle-class families, they might already have their own vehicles and drivers. Maybe, the gap lies in income groups that are a bit lower. 

Some urban cities in India have deployed EV buses for public transportation, could the same be done for transporting kids by private companies?

So, maybe the TAM for this is urban centres. Someone might have to come up with the SAM: how large is the actual pool of parents who can afford the services of such a startup and want it to make this routine? Could this be scalable in smaller towns? Maybe, all the challenges that Uber and Ola face would be the same here, just more children-y.

Will the future of child transportation be electric and genuinely safe? Or is this a fad that won’t get the market maturity it requires?