Bihar car-pool platform ‘RodBez’ provides connectivity to villages

Ride-share application has been downloaded by 50,000 users in the last couple of months

Krishan Murari A 29-year old Bihar-based former rickshaw-puller and vegetable seller has taken the state’s rural transportation landscape by storm through his one-way car-pool platform called ‘RodBez’, providing last mile connectivity to small town and village commuters.

A brain-child of Dilkhush Kumar, the ride-share application has been downloaded by 50, 000 users in the last couples of months. Operating from his office in Patna, supported by his IIT and IIM graduate employees, Kumar seeks to provide a small town friendly Uber-like experience to riders.

Christened the start-up king of Bihar, seven years ago, the 29-year-old was pulling a rickshaw in Delhi and selling vegetables in Patna. Today, he employs graduates from IIT and IIM, and is the founder and CEO of the appbased start-up, RodBez. Ratan Tata is his inspiration.

A big portrait of Tata adorns a corner of his office corridor seeking to inspire his employees and co-workers. RodBez is his Kumar’s second venture in last seven years. Almost all the people Kumar has hired are graduates of India’s top colleges including IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management) and IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology).

The fact that they are from Bihar and prefer to work there helps. Most earn anywhere between Rs 40,000-50,000 a month. Kumar wants to pay them more as the company grows. “Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi said that even people with slippers will board the plane. With our startup, every person in Bihar will definitely get into a car,” says another young employee, Yashwant, who is 24-year-old and he graduated from IIIT-Bhubaneswar in 2021.

The name ‘RodBez’ is Kumar’s clever, self-reflexive take on the ‘Bihari’ pronunciation of the word ‘roadways.’ Call it an inside joke, but it’s ‘hard relate’ for riders too. Kumar is no greenhorn in the startup ecosystem. RodBez is his second venture in seven years. It takes a leaf out of the playbook of big guns like Uber and Ola, but with a distinctive rural twist.

Customers are lured by RodBez’s sweet spot: one-way fares. People who hire taxis for longer routes have to shell out extra money for the return-trip as well. But Kumar’s RodBez is marketed as a ‘oneway taxi, taxipool and carpool platform’. “We are connecting the village to city and city to village,” he says, sipping tea on a sofa in his office in Patna’s Saguna Mor.

RURAL TRANSPORTATION 

“Our revolution is on the way,” Kumar says, which also happens to be the tagline of RodBez. He wants to expand his ‘kingdom’ to villages across India– ”from Kashmir to Kerala. But there’s a lot riding on RodBez, which he launched in May 2022 with his cousin, Siddharth.

He has invested his life savings in the start-up and relied on the largesse of “well-wishers”. “Risk se ishq hai (I love taking risks),” he says with a grin. In the past four months, over 50,000 people have downloaded RodBez, which has a three-star rating on Google’s Play Store. Kumar claims that one lakh customers have used the service so far.

“A poor child has to struggle a lot to survive. One thing we learn quickly is that respect is not for the person but for the money. The world worships the one who has wealth,” Kumar says. Many entrepreneurs and funders, who can trace their roots to Bihar, are helping Kumar because he is building a company in their home state, not in Bengaluru or Gurugram.

Technology developer Nirbhaya, who runs his own company in Delhi, contacted Dilkhush Kumar when he started RodBez. Nirbhaya’s family is from Supaul in Bihar and he wanted to do something for his state. He helped Kumar develop the algorithm and app for RodBez without charging a fee, devoting five hours to it every day.

Nirbhaya isn’t the only one to believe in the potential of RodBez. Kumar’s cousin Siddharth Shankar Jha left his government job with the National Green Tribunal, Kolkata, and returned to Patna to team up with Kumar. He is the co-founder of RodBez. Arvind Jha, senior vice-president of Newgen Software who also runs Mithila Angel Network, is one of the “well-wishers”.

An IIT-Kharagpur alumni, Jha, according to Kumar, invested Rs 30 lakh in RodBez and plays mentor when required. Ajay Jha, who lives in Colorado, has taken on the mantle of a mentor, and reportedly plans to invest in the start-up later this year.

“Dilkhush’s idea is interesting because customers are conscious of travel pricing. He has a knowledge of the ground reality and business, and he is capable of doing some grea