The Panic Button In On Your Taxi App May Not Be Entirely Safe Or Helpful. These Women Found Out First Hand

The Panic Button In On Your Taxi App May Not Be Entirely Safe Or Helpful. These Women Found Out First Hand

I am a 23-year-old, and much to everyone’s surprise and my parent’s disappointment, I still don’t know how to drive. A life skill that the women of India need to hone to be able to keep themselves safe. Because despite of all the steps and actions being taken to make the public transport or even cabs safer for women, their safety still ends up getting compromised. Especially after the recent incident with Aparna Balachander that took place while she was taking an Uber ride.

Aparna Balachander, a resident of Bengaluru, recently took an Uber to get back home at night, only to find one of of her worst nightmares come true. The driver threatened Aparna, asking her to get out of the cab or else he would tear her clothes apart. Yes, you read that right. Aparna shared the entire incident on Twitter by sharing how during her ride back home, the cab driver kept ranting about bad customers and then later started giving her unsolicited advice asking her not to drink or be out at such late hours of the night. A point at which, Aparna gave the driver’s ego a hit, by saying it wasn’t any of his business and that she hadn’t been drinking anyway.

She said, “I told him I didn’t drink and asked him to mind his own business. He went on to call me a slut and also to say things like I can’t even be his keep who cleans his shoes. At this point, he started slowing down the cab and I got extremely scared. I pressed the ‘safety’ button on Uber. Instead of calling me, they called the cab driver and he started telling the customer care person that ‘I am extremely drunk.” And we honestly couldn’t wrap our heads around the information.

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To find out that the safety button we see in our everyday cab rides, giving us a sense of security, is actually flawed to this level, came as a shock to all of us, and especially Aparna as she found herself entangled in what felt nothing less than a ride to hell. She further wrote, “At this point, I had no choice but to start screaming, asking the customer care to listen to me. The woman on the call spoke to me and I cried begging her to help me. She told me to get out of the cab and that she will book me another one immediately. Meanwhile, this cab driver started threatening me with things like ‘I will tear your clothes if you don’t leave the cab now’.”

And before you think that was the end of this harrowing tale, it gets worse. After somehow managing to get out of the car at 11:15 pm at night and even waiting for a new cab for close to 15 minutes, the customer care had still not reverted to her or even tried to find a reasonable solution in that moment of fear and panic. She ultimately had to call her friends for help because clearly Uber’s customer care service was as useless as the panic button in the car.

You would imagine that in a situation of panic or frenzy, the SOS button that Uber provides its customers with can be your safety net , but you’d be preposterously wrong, for after thorough research its come to notice that the panic button in cabs is absolutely redundant. Another incident that had taken place in 2017 revealed the story of a girl, Radhika Das, who took a cab in Delhi only to find out that the button had actually been disabled by the driver, and without him wanting it to work, she couldn’t have reached out for any sort of help, in case such a situation were to arise.

In fact, there are also several videos on YouTube that show people trying to find out what actually happens when the panic button is pressed. We wish the results could surprise us, but they didn’t. Turns out if functioning properly, the button will cause for a sudden alarm, but the kind that will fail to draw any kind of attention to the car. And with Aparna sharing how it is the Uber driver that receives a call and not the passenger who pressed it, our entire faith in travelling alone in cabs has been shaken.

At a time, when women’s safety has literally become a topic of national and global concern, we see such big companies promising fake safety features to its passengers and putting their lives at risk. Ad if this is how insufficient and indifferent these companies are, then maybe it is time to pay heed to my father’s advice of learning how to drive, because clearly travelling in cabs now is not as safe as we assumed it to be.

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Sadhika Sehgal

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