Bengaluru: The 26-year old Delhi resident who sued Uber in a United States court this January, after accusing one of its drivers of raping her in the Indian capital last December has “voluntarily ended” her lawsuit against the taxi aggregator firm, according to media reports.
The woman, who was allegedly raped by the driver of an Uber taxi that she had called to take her back home to Northwest Delhi’s Inderlok, had in her lawsuit compared her experience to the ending of a horror movie and had accused the company of “being more focused on its bottom-line profit than practical and effective safety measures that could save lives”.
The incident not only re-ignited a debate across India about the safety of women but also resulted in the Delhi Government temporarily banning Uber and other similar application-based online taxi firms pending their compliance with stricter verification norms for their drivers.
According to Reuters, no details were released, either in the court filing or from both parties, as to how the case was settled. In April this year, however, as PC World reported, Uber sought to deflect responsibility by seeking to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that “it never had a relationship with the driver in question” and that the alleged crime “falls outside of the jurisdiction of U.S courts.”.
It had also been reported by Reuters, however, that Uber and the woman had in principle agreed to participate in private mediation as a means of quickly resolving the lawsuit.
The criminal case against the driver, of course, will carry on in India.