Commuters are happy that “passenger safety” has been given priority in the draft City Taxi Scheme, which has a clause stating that “aggregators and drivers will be jointly responsible for any injury, harm, offence or crime (during a journey)”.
The scheme lists 20 clauses for drivers and cab aggregators to ensure commuter safety. But passengers are asking why is the government bent on tinkering with a model that is “so successful”.
“The draft taxi scheme has a series of measures to ensure passenger safety and to keep errant drivers at bay. The stringent rules will ensure that we get licensed cabs with drivers whose background have been checked, besides installation of panic buttons, having a passenger-register book, GPS screen display, a control room and a SOS connect with the local cops while travelling,” said Shilpi Majumder, a commuter who opts for cabs run by aggregators.
“But I am against the state proposing to control fares and to put a cap on the total number of taxis run by an aggregator,” she added.
Currently, aggregators run more than 10,000 taxis and the numbers are likely to grow. But the new scheme proposes that the maximum number should be 4,000 cabs per aggregator. There is also an apprehension that the government may introduce higher fares. “The government should understand that it was because of the errant black-and-yellow cabbies that we switched to aggregators like Ola and Uber,” Majumder pointed out.
As for passenger safety, the fresh notification seeks to punish aggregators for any crime committed against passengers during a journey. This is contrary to the Uber’s ‘terms of use’ that stipulate that the aggregator firm will not be responsible for any service provided by the driver-partners.
Shirish Deshpande of Mumbai Grahak Panchayat said that his organization will propose a maximum cap on fares for black-and-yellow taxis, Cool Cabs, fleet taxis and aggregators and allow them to compete below those fares so that passengers don’t end up paying exorbitant sums. “Such competition will improve quality of service. As for the low fares by Uber and Ola, we are also keeping a check whether it is predatory pricing and if so, we may file a petition in the Competition Commission,” he said.