India made us rethink payments: Uber's Travis Kalanick

Competition is good, Uber chief says about Ola; advocates 'jugaad'

India has forced Uber to rethink how payments are to be accepted from users globally, while the company has identified Bengaluru, the country's tech hub as one of the three engineering hubs with Bay Area and Beijing to transform the global transport industry, Uber's co-founder said Travis Kalanick on Saturday.

"In India, payments are very different. That has been a big area to change on how we do things," said Kalanick at the plenary of the Startup India event.

Uber, which allows its users globally to sign up their credit cards had to redesign its process in India to accept payment wallet such as Paytm and also accept cash in a country where only 20 million users have credit cards.

"Competition is good for the gong," said Kalanick, when asked about Ola, the local hailing app modelled on Uber which dominates the India transport market.  "The way we do that is to empowering local teams to win."

Kalanick, who coded out of a beach in Trivandrum when they built the initial product, credited the Indian way of innovation -  Jugaad saying "alwaysbejugaading."

"In office we have the saying 'fear is the disease, hustle is the answer'. And my Indian team asks what is hustle in Hindi?," said Kalanick and here is the answer "alwaysbejugaading."