OLA AND UBER TAXI STRIKE POSTPONED TO MARCH 21

Commuters in the city breathed a temporary sigh of relief on Tuesday after drivers attached with app-based taxi services like Ola and Uber deferred the strike by a month.

After holding a meeting at Govandi, the cab drivers decided to postpone their strike to March 21. Earlier, the decided to go on strike from March 1.

“We have decided to go on an indefinite strike from March 21. Prior to this, we will protest against the companies at Azad Maidan, keeping the vehicles off the road, on March 14,” said Raju Patil, president of Sangharsh Tourist Taxi Chalak Malak Sangh.

Irked by their steadily reducing income, increasing penalties and a cut on incentive policies, the cabbies had threatened strike from the end of February or the beginning of March, after an informal meeting at BandraKurla Complex last Sunday.

Patil added that nearly 800 to 1,000 drivers with Ola and Uber were present at the Govandi meeting. He said that their union will submit a memorandum of the demands to the government and the managements of Ola and Uber, on Wednesday.

The drivers said that their daily earning had gone down and they were not receiving sufficient bookings from the companies for the last three months . Also, they were being slapped with penalties (for denial of duty) and their incentives had been reduced.

Presently, Mumbai has over 30,000 Ola and Uber taxis. Some drivers said that they brought taxis relying on the company’s assurances about a certain amount of monthly business. They claimed that the new vehicles had been brought against loans, but it was getting difficult for them to pay the monthly instalments on time.

Delhi and several southern metro cities such as Bengaluru and Hyderabad have already faced protests.

If the cabs go on strike, this will be the first one for app-based cabs in the city. It may cause inconvenience to commuters because these cabs have rapidly become popular since their inception in 2014. Several Mumbaiites rely on the cabs now, which assure fast, reliable and comfortable ride.

Meanwhile, the state government is in the process of bringing in new rules to regulate appbased aggregators with the City Taxi Rules 2016. There is a lot of pressure on the government from the drivers of traditional cabs and auto rickshaws to reign in and regulate the app based cabs, who are seen to have diverted profits away from traditional cabs.