While government is confined to indoors and outdoors advertisements, a few decide to take the effort to another level. Taking the save fuel message as seriously as it was meant to be, Nadir Nilgiriwala has come up with a website www.missioncarpool.com that pools the details of lift seekers and car owners and provides a platform where they help each other and also save petrol. “The website has around 48,200 members, who benefit by giving and taking lift from each other. The domain is especially for office goers and aims to encourage cost and fuel saving. And as a by-product it also helps a person socialise and kill boredom while travelling long distances in the city,” says Nilgiriwala.

The users of the website have fed their details including their phone numbers, smoking habits, food habits (veg / non-veg), marital status, workplace, even caste and many more to make it easier for others to choose from who they want to travel.

“Twenty per cent of our registration is from Pune. And we focus on IT enabled cities, where people need to travel long distances and eventually hundreds of cars follow the same route to reach the same destination. So we bring them together to share the vehicle. This is a non-profit website and we also request our users to refrain from earning out of this,” he adds.

Sadru Somji, businessman has been using the site since past two years. “I use to spend around Rs 3000 on petrol, but now the expense has gone down to Rs 500 per month. Thanks to carpool service. We are altogether five people, who travel from Dhole Patil to Camp. Since we have been doing this for past so many days, we are also friends now. And we make sure that our families should meet and we go out for dinner once a month.”

Joti Deshpande travels from Yerwada to Bund Garden everyday and says that she cannot afford to take a rickshaw. “One of my friend told me about this website and I registered. Since then a person, who works in the same building as mine drops me everyday and we share the cost, which is much less than what I would have spent on public transport,” she says.