Lockdowns take away our bread

Tanveer Pasha

We transport operators, including cab and autorickshaw drivers, were worried that weekend and night curfew was resulting in further reduction of our earnings. After repeated requests, the government lifted the weekend curfew, but fear of the pandemic among people has not gone away. This, thanks to the government’s delayed decision to let people move around at the end of a tiring week.

There are reports by experts that there is no reason for people to panic because most are vaccinated. We cab drivers are facing a severe financial crisis, but the government is only concentrating on things like imposing curfew at night and on weekends, which further affects the transport and tourism sectors. For the past two years, the segment has completely collapsed due to Covid and people working from home.

There has been a severe drop in the demand for taxi service. Even airport drop and pickup demands have come down drastically. It all started when techies started to work from home. We straightaway lost 30 per cent business by way of cab bookings. This resulted in most drivers struggling to pay up monthly instalments on vehicles procured on loan. House rents, fuel and maintenance costs of these vehicles all became so very difficult for us to manage. Many failed to pay EMIs, and their vehicles were seized. Being declared defaulters meant that no other financial institutes were willing to offer them a loan.

All major software companies, including those in the ITPL, Bagmane Tech Park, Infosys, Wipro, RMZ, Accenture campuses, be it in Sarjapur, Whitefield or Bannerghatta that had tied up with transport companies to ferry lakhs of their employees to and fro daily, suddenly lost interest in us. With several of them asking their employees to work from home, we started suffering reduced business of up to 40 per cent, resulting in huge losses to us all.

December 25 to 31 is when we do a lot of business. We lost that too. And, government-run transports operated even though the Covid number reached a new high. This clearly shows that the government is only worried about its department and does not bother about private sectors. We have just started recovering from losses of previous lockdowns, but it is again in a hurry to impose another one.

Most drivers get business only during weekends. We request the government to come up with different solutions to curb the pandemic rather than imposing curfew, like an increased focus on awareness and enforcement of the mask rule instead of a complete lockdown.

(Tanveer Pasha President is Ola, Taxiforsure and Uber Drivers’ and Owners’ Association)