App-based cabbies unite as earnings slip

“My cab has been sitting idle for the last two months,” says Tanveer Pasha. “I have been very busy with union work.”

Pasha, a 32-year-old driver attached to Ola, India’s largest app-based cab hailing service, is also the coordinator of the OlaTaxiForSure-Uber Owners and Drivers Association.

Pasha and his associates had created quite a stir in Bengaluru on January 23, when they organised a protest rally against a decline in the earnings of those attached with Ola and Uber. The cab drivers blamed the companies for this, suggesting that they were colluding with each other to drive down incentives and, hence, the earnings of drivers.

“When I joined this business three years ago, I was making a lot of money,” Pasha says. “There were weeks when I earned around ₹40,000.” Initially, incentives were paid on completing 10 trips a day. “However, they then increased this limit to 14 trips and then to 18.”

Pasha says Bengaluru’s perennially choked roads make it virtually impossible for the cab drivers to reach the new target. In fact, a recent study by the Bangalore Development Authority estimated that the city faced an annual loss of ₹3,700 crore due to traffic congestion.

Premnath Shetty, 43, who is attached to both Ola and Uber, says: “Initially, the companies used to deduct 10% from our earnings as commission.” As the commission was so low and drivers were paid an additional incentive, the extremely low prices charged by the firms did not matter. However, things changed about a year ago. The commission was increased to 20%, and deducted from each trip as well as the consolidated earnings credited to the accounts of drivers. The hike in commission led to a significant slump in earnings.

In 2016, Karnataka became the first state to regulate the cab business by introducing the Karnataka On-Demand Transportation Technology Aggregator (OTTA) rules. The primary objective of OTTAwas to regulate the surge pricing model. According to it, the maximum a customer can be charged per km is ₹14.5 for non-AC cabs and ₹19.5 for AC ones. However, cabbies seem to have misunderstood the intention behind the rules. “We have demanded that the companies pay us the minimum amount stipulated,” says Pasha.