INDIA’S ultra-competitive app-based taxi-hailing market has quickly become a multi-billion-dollar industry, but controversy surrounding safety, rejected licences and protesting cabbies threatens to slam the brakes on its spectacular rise.

    Domestic company Ola Cabs and U.S.-based Uber are booming, fuelled by a rising number of professionals wanting an easy-to-book, clean and air-conditioned cab in India’s rapidly growing and congested cities.

    “We have barely scratched the surface. We need to be in every corner of India and it is a huge country, so the potential is huge,” Ola spokesman Anand Subramanian said.

    But it hasn’t been a completely smooth ride, with Indian authorities rejecting Uber and Ola’s applications to operate in New Delhi, even impounding their cars, and both firms facing angry protests from traditional taxi drivers.

    Ola Cabs has soared from fledgling Internet startup to the leader of India’s smartphone taxi-hiring industry in just five years and is now worth an estimated US$2 billion.

    It recently bought up domestic competitor TaxiForSure for a reported US$200 million and is also outperforming web and mobile app-based rival Meru Cabs in a crowded marketplace.

    Private but often shoddy and uncomfortable cabs have long plied India’s notoriously vehicle-and-animal-congested roads, filling a void created by patchy and unreliable public transport networks.

    But in 2010, two young entrepreneurs in Mumbai — Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati — decided that India’s tech-savvy and wealthy middle-classes wanted the convenience of a comfortable ride with just a couple of clicks of their smartphones.

    They founded Ola and started operating with only a handful of vehicles before increasing the number of cars on its network to 10,000, across 10 cities, by last year.

    An aggressive recruitment drive over the past 12 months has resulted in its operations rising more than tenfold and Ola now operates 150,000 vehicles in 100 cities stretching the length and breadth of India.

    Ola notched 200,000 rides a day in January and predicts it will record over a million a day this month. They have also started to offer auto-rickshaws for hire and are to start delivering groceries too.

    It doesn’t own the majority of the cars itself but helps drivers acquire loans, which are then repaid in small sums.

    Some of those drivers joined hundreds of others working for Ola and Uber at a demonstration in New Delhi yesterday, saying the city government’s crackdown on the industry had forced them off the roads.(SD-Agencies)