On January 1, Anil Kumar made his first trip to the Ola Cabs office on the Delhi-Gurgaon border. Just days earlier, the Delhi government had banned Uber as well as other app-based taxi-aggregator services such as Ola and TaxiForSure after a 27-year old woman alleged that a taxi driver, driving in partnership with Uber, had raped her in the cab on December 6, 2014.
Aware of the Uber case but oblivious that the ban applied to similar service providers, Anil Kumar applied for registration as a taxi driver on the Ola Cab platform. He submitted the car's legal documents with his professional credentials typed up on a Rs 100 stamp paper, signed an agreement, and waited at his Mongolpuri residence for police verification. By February, he was on the road in an Alto car, using Ola Cabs to connect to customers waiting to be driven all over the city.
He was not the only one. Many more drivers joined the Ola and Uber platforms despite knowing about the ban because of the amounts of money they could earn – at least Rs 90,000 per month, at the stage when Uber restarted its operations in end of January.
“There were hundreds like me waiting their turn at the Gurgaon office in January,” he said. “I even remarked to a friend Kamal who had accompanied me on why the company had called 600-500 of us on the same day instead of allotting us turns to appear at their office in a more organised way.”
By March, earning adequately from the trips and a cash-incentive based on the number of rides, the 36-year old driver had applied for a Rs 4 lakh loan to buy a car. And then things changed in the first week of June. The first loan instalment of Rs 9,000 is due on June 23, he said, but he has no idea how he will meet the monthly instalment.
What changed?
Anil Kumar's future has suddenly become uncertain because of another driver's reported crime. On June 2, a day after news reports of a 21-year old woman's allegation that a driver, on an Uber app, had molested her on May 30 in Gurgaon, Delhi transport minister Gopal Rai stated that he had rejected the applications of Uber and Ola for fresh licences following the December ban.
Rai said the companies had failed to adhere to the ban since December, share data of drivers and vehicles, and give an undertaking to comply with safety regulations, particularly for women commuters, in the week's time provided to them after a meeting at his office five days earlier.
"After the formation of the new government on February 14 this year, the matter was brought to my notice and I wrote to the central government seeking effective implementation of the ban, through the department of Information Technology," Rai stated. "Certain difficulties were pointed out, since it came to light that the server of this App-based service was not in India."
Police crackdown
The Gurgaon incident also put pressure on the Delhi Police to show it was doing its bit to enforce the five month-old ban.
Matching the technology savvy of errant drivers, who were continuing to use the taxi aggregators' apps to operate their cars and look for customers, the Delhi traffic police asked its personnel to download the apps for Uber, Ola and TaxiForSure, and use them to book cabs and nab drivers who responded.
The drivers have had to come up with new ploys to evade the police. “If we get a call from a VIP colony, such as those near Connaught Place, we don't go. Similarly, if anyone calls from an area we know falls near a police chowki, we decline the ride,” said 28-year old Jitendra. But it is not a fool-proof system.
On June 9 alone, in a “special drive,” the traffic police prosecuted 158 drivers and impounded 120 taxis in a period of 24 hours, said Sharad Agarwal, Additional Commissioner of Police. Only Easy Cab, Meru Cab, Chanson Cab, Yo Cab, Mega Cab and Air Cab were permitted to operate radio taxi in Delhi, he stated. This is in addition to approximately 750 cars that had been impounded for making trips booked through the apps of Uber, Ola and TaxiForSure in the past week.
Drivers Distraught
All of this has left the drivers distraught, with prospects for their future uncertain. Demonstrating at Delhi's Jantar Mantar grounds, they described the reiteration of the ban as an attack on their livelihoods. In conversations, a majority describes a few months of working with the App-based aggregator services in a “sharing economy” model as the best they have experienced in their careers, some even citing decades of experience of driving taxis.
Forty-one-year old Virendra Singh Chauhan said driving with with Ola last two months, he could earn the same amount of money as he used to while driving a car for a multi-national company, except working six hours less a day. Twenty-eight-year old Amit described it as “man marzi ka kaam,” working as per his will. He said he had worked for seven years first with Mega Cabs, then with Meru, and was asked to leave the latter when he needed six weeks' leave after his wife living in Narnaul in Haryana fell ill.
For Shashikant, being a partner driver with Uber allowed him to switch off his phone and turn down work as he liked, unlike driving tourist vehicles in a 12-14 hour stretch in his previous job. At the same time, for these drivers the freedom to decide their working hours and new choices they have enjoyed while working in partnership with app-based taxi aggregators have come with a peculiar absence of legal protection and clarity on their status vis-a-vis these companies. The companies reassure the drivers that they will take responsibility for sorting the legal mess, but yet hold no liability, reflecting the grey area that aggregators or intermediaries like Uber and Ola Cabs occupy at present in the law.
For instance, Anil Kumar, the driver from Mongolpuri, as well as other drivers using Ola Cabs, cite taking a loan a few weeks ago on the company's encouragement. “I have faith in the company and am not saying Ola deceived me,” said Kumar, who worked as a driver for call centres and corporate companies for 15 years for a pittance. “They want us to earn well. But it was on the suggestion of their officials that I took a Rs 4 lakh loan from the State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur in March. They suggested that I take a loan to buy a Wagon-R car. In return, they gave an assurance of keeping us on their platform for three years and undertook responsibility for it.” Another driver also claimed to have similarly purchased a Wagon-R car on the company's suggestion.
No legal protection
There has been no formal communication from the companies to the drivers since the June 2 order. “I went to the Ola Cabs Gurgaon office on June 6 to enquire. An official told me it was not their fault but that they will find a solution after the courts opened after the summer vacation,” said Anil Kumar. “They said to keep driving and that they will reimburse us if we are fined or the car gets impounded. But how is that possible? If the car gets impounded, we are finished.”
The experience of Uber drivers is no different. “I do not have even one official's number whom I could call and ask, what's going on, what is going to happen to us,” said Jitendra Kumar, a 28-year old driver from Narnaul in Haryana. Most have relied on the informal network of fellow drivers for information. “We don't even have a union,” said 41-year old Virendra Singh Chauhan, who returned to his village in Uttarakhand for a few days after the ban was enforced. “That is why there is this confusion,” he said. “Even if we had a union, what would it do?” wondered another driver.
Transport Minister Gopal Rai declined to meet the taxi drivers at his office on June 8.
The aggregator companies
Responding to Gopal Rai's statement that Uber did not furnish all data as required by the Delhi government, Gagan Bhatia, General Manager Delhi for Uber, responded that the company had complied with the government's request for data last week:
Declining to share specific numbers on the total number of driver partners that operate on the Uber platform, he stated that “many thousands of drivers” partenered with Uber in Delhi, including more than 20 women drivers
Spokespersons for Ola Cabs did not respond to questions, though they confirmed they had received the emailed questionnaire.
(*Name of all drivers changed on request)
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Aware of the Uber case but oblivious that the ban applied to similar service providers, Anil Kumar applied for registration as a taxi driver on the Ola Cab platform. He submitted the car's legal documents with his professional credentials typed up on a Rs 100 stamp paper, signed an agreement, and waited at his Mongolpuri residence for police verification. By February, he was on the road in an Alto car, using Ola Cabs to connect to customers waiting to be driven all over the city.
He was not the only one. Many more drivers joined the Ola and Uber platforms despite knowing about the ban because of the amounts of money they could earn – at least Rs 90,000 per month, at the stage when Uber restarted its operations in end of January.
“There were hundreds like me waiting their turn at the Gurgaon office in January,” he said. “I even remarked to a friend Kamal who had accompanied me on why the company had called 600-500 of us on the same day instead of allotting us turns to appear at their office in a more organised way.”
By March, earning adequately from the trips and a cash-incentive based on the number of rides, the 36-year old driver had applied for a Rs 4 lakh loan to buy a car. And then things changed in the first week of June. The first loan instalment of Rs 9,000 is due on June 23, he said, but he has no idea how he will meet the monthly instalment.
What changed?
Anil Kumar's future has suddenly become uncertain because of another driver's reported crime. On June 2, a day after news reports of a 21-year old woman's allegation that a driver, on an Uber app, had molested her on May 30 in Gurgaon, Delhi transport minister Gopal Rai stated that he had rejected the applications of Uber and Ola for fresh licences following the December ban.
Rai said the companies had failed to adhere to the ban since December, share data of drivers and vehicles, and give an undertaking to comply with safety regulations, particularly for women commuters, in the week's time provided to them after a meeting at his office five days earlier.
"After the formation of the new government on February 14 this year, the matter was brought to my notice and I wrote to the central government seeking effective implementation of the ban, through the department of Information Technology," Rai stated. "Certain difficulties were pointed out, since it came to light that the server of this App-based service was not in India."
Police crackdown
The Gurgaon incident also put pressure on the Delhi Police to show it was doing its bit to enforce the five month-old ban.
Matching the technology savvy of errant drivers, who were continuing to use the taxi aggregators' apps to operate their cars and look for customers, the Delhi traffic police asked its personnel to download the apps for Uber, Ola and TaxiForSure, and use them to book cabs and nab drivers who responded.
The drivers have had to come up with new ploys to evade the police. “If we get a call from a VIP colony, such as those near Connaught Place, we don't go. Similarly, if anyone calls from an area we know falls near a police chowki, we decline the ride,” said 28-year old Jitendra. But it is not a fool-proof system.
On June 9 alone, in a “special drive,” the traffic police prosecuted 158 drivers and impounded 120 taxis in a period of 24 hours, said Sharad Agarwal, Additional Commissioner of Police. Only Easy Cab, Meru Cab, Chanson Cab, Yo Cab, Mega Cab and Air Cab were permitted to operate radio taxi in Delhi, he stated. This is in addition to approximately 750 cars that had been impounded for making trips booked through the apps of Uber, Ola and TaxiForSure in the past week.
Drivers Distraught
All of this has left the drivers distraught, with prospects for their future uncertain. Demonstrating at Delhi's Jantar Mantar grounds, they described the reiteration of the ban as an attack on their livelihoods. In conversations, a majority describes a few months of working with the App-based aggregator services in a “sharing economy” model as the best they have experienced in their careers, some even citing decades of experience of driving taxis.
Forty-one-year old Virendra Singh Chauhan said driving with with Ola last two months, he could earn the same amount of money as he used to while driving a car for a multi-national company, except working six hours less a day. Twenty-eight-year old Amit described it as “man marzi ka kaam,” working as per his will. He said he had worked for seven years first with Mega Cabs, then with Meru, and was asked to leave the latter when he needed six weeks' leave after his wife living in Narnaul in Haryana fell ill.
For Shashikant, being a partner driver with Uber allowed him to switch off his phone and turn down work as he liked, unlike driving tourist vehicles in a 12-14 hour stretch in his previous job. At the same time, for these drivers the freedom to decide their working hours and new choices they have enjoyed while working in partnership with app-based taxi aggregators have come with a peculiar absence of legal protection and clarity on their status vis-a-vis these companies. The companies reassure the drivers that they will take responsibility for sorting the legal mess, but yet hold no liability, reflecting the grey area that aggregators or intermediaries like Uber and Ola Cabs occupy at present in the law.
For instance, Anil Kumar, the driver from Mongolpuri, as well as other drivers using Ola Cabs, cite taking a loan a few weeks ago on the company's encouragement. “I have faith in the company and am not saying Ola deceived me,” said Kumar, who worked as a driver for call centres and corporate companies for 15 years for a pittance. “They want us to earn well. But it was on the suggestion of their officials that I took a Rs 4 lakh loan from the State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur in March. They suggested that I take a loan to buy a Wagon-R car. In return, they gave an assurance of keeping us on their platform for three years and undertook responsibility for it.” Another driver also claimed to have similarly purchased a Wagon-R car on the company's suggestion.
No legal protection
There has been no formal communication from the companies to the drivers since the June 2 order. “I went to the Ola Cabs Gurgaon office on June 6 to enquire. An official told me it was not their fault but that they will find a solution after the courts opened after the summer vacation,” said Anil Kumar. “They said to keep driving and that they will reimburse us if we are fined or the car gets impounded. But how is that possible? If the car gets impounded, we are finished.”
The experience of Uber drivers is no different. “I do not have even one official's number whom I could call and ask, what's going on, what is going to happen to us,” said Jitendra Kumar, a 28-year old driver from Narnaul in Haryana. Most have relied on the informal network of fellow drivers for information. “We don't even have a union,” said 41-year old Virendra Singh Chauhan, who returned to his village in Uttarakhand for a few days after the ban was enforced. “That is why there is this confusion,” he said. “Even if we had a union, what would it do?” wondered another driver.
Transport Minister Gopal Rai declined to meet the taxi drivers at his office on June 8.
The aggregator companies
Responding to Gopal Rai's statement that Uber did not furnish all data as required by the Delhi government, Gagan Bhatia, General Manager Delhi for Uber, responded that the company had complied with the government's request for data last week:
“We made a full and complete application for a radio taxi license in January along with all driver details that are required as per the application process. The request for additional data by the honourable minister was verbal and not a part of any licensing process. No specifics on the content or format of such information were provided to us. All personal information of drivers and riders are protected by the fundamental right to privacy. Given this, we are required to treat this data with utmost caution and diligence. After a detailed discussion with the Ministry, Uber last week complied with the Minister’s request for data in a good faith belief that we are required by law to do so."
Declining to share specific numbers on the total number of driver partners that operate on the Uber platform, he stated that “many thousands of drivers” partenered with Uber in Delhi, including more than 20 women drivers
Spokespersons for Ola Cabs did not respond to questions, though they confirmed they had received the emailed questionnaire.
(*Name of all drivers changed on request)
