The Transport department in Goa recently released draft guidelines for app based taxi aggregators in Goa, effectively opening the doors for private aggregators to begin operations in the taxi business in Goa. Predictably, the local taxi operators are up in arms against these guidelines and the handing over a business that they’ve built and sustained over years into the hands of corporate sharks whose primary fidelity is to profit. The public opinion, too, seems to be skewed in the favour of these app based taxis citing various reasons including unregulated and inflated fares by the local taxi operators, lack of availability, complaints regarding the behaviour of taxi operators, and so on. Moreover, the decline of Goan tourism was also blamed on the taxi drivers. They’ve already been termed as the so-called ‘taxi mafia’ of Goa.
The taxi industry in Goa today is staring into a two pronged crisis – to recover their image as the brand ambassadors of Goan tourism and erase this image of a mafia, and the looming threat of the app based aggregators which the government has been trying to introduce in Goa for some years. The taxi business in Goa has been built over successive decades, mostly by the members belonging to the Bahujan communities. They represent the last vestige of the early evolution of the tourism industry in Goa, even prior to the introduction of the tourism policy in the late eighties. Even though the recent propaganda against them has become increasingly bitter, there are so many instances wherein the Goan taxi drivers have gone out of their way to make their passengers feel convenient.
First of all, it is imperative that one understands the taxi business in Goa and how it operates. It is not an uniform, homogenized industry but there are different types of taxi operators that ply their vehicles in Goa. There are those who operate at airports, the yellow black taxis that ply outside the railway stations, the taxis that queue up outside hotels, and the ones who wait for customers at their designated taxi stands for a customer. These taxis pick up passengers from point A and drop them off at point B. It is an unwritten rule that they will, once having dropped a passenger, not pick another passenger to return to their point of origin. This is done in order to not oversstep on the business of the taxi drivers of another location and sustain the cooperative nature of this business wherein even one taxi operator’s greed for rides outside his usual territory might break a chain of trust and impinge onto the livelihood of others. That is why they charge 50% return fare on these trips.
Now, why do these rates appear higher as compared to the app based aggregators like Uber and Ola? First of all, app based aggregators do not operate on fair pricing models. Their rates are heavily subsidized by the extra cash, i.e. the venture capital, they have at their disposal. They burn this cash to lower rates for passengers and annihilate the local competition. Using these predatory techniques, they eventually establish their monopoly, forcing the local cab drivers either out of business or coercing them to sign up with them.
Secondly, the traffic on Goan roads isn’t as congested as the metropolitan cities where these ride hailing apps are abundant. For instance, from my home in Ponda to Panjim city, I cover the 30 kilometer odd distance in around 45 minutes. In a recent visit to Mumbai, I covered 8.5 kilometers in 45 minutes. This often makes us believe that if I am charged Rs. 500 for a 45 min ride in Mumbai, why am I being charged Rupees 1200 for the same distance in Goa? In short, unlike these apps, the Goan taxis do not operate on predatory pricing that kills other players in the business. One can always talk to a cab driver in Indian metropolitan cities and inquire how their earnings have varied in the course of driving for app based aggregators? Their stories and the coercion to work through exploitative working conditions would really make you question the promise of convenience of this so-called gig economy.
The existing problems with the Goan taxi community will not magically disappear once these app based aggregators are introduced. Instead, they would get even more complicated. First of all, it needs to be reiterated that the so-called lack of standardised fare in Goa is a matter of enforcement. Also, one needs to understand that these rates vary according to the distance and type of the car. An Ertiga cannot charge the same amount as an Innova. Moreover, these are rates that are notified by the transport department, and the taxi owners themselves have no say in deciding these rates. And most importantly, the introduction of app based aggregators will not necessarily bring in standardised fares precisely because these apps very much thrive on an unregulated pricing model for their rides. Their pricing depends on various factors including waiting charges, driver rating, type of car etc. But the real catch in these apps is surge pricing and how, in situations of high demand and/or adverse weather conditions, the fares for these taxis escalate to 1.5x-3x the usual amount. How are we then imagining that the problem of unstandardised fares will be resolved by the apps?
Secondly, if one goes through the guidelines, it is mandatory for the aggregators to pay the taxi drivers the stipulated fare as notified by the transport department. Any commission and the profit for the aggregator will have to be levied on top of this fare. That implies this amount will be extracted from the customers. So effectively the rides are going to be expensive for the customers, and not cheaper than they already are.
The crucial bit in this entire saga around Goan taxis is this characterization of the Goan taxi drivers as ‘taxi mafia’, a label that has come to gradually stick and generate preemptive bias towards them. They are called such because of their control over the mobility of tourists that often erupts into conflicts over who has the right to ferry tourists from one point to another. For instance, there is a vertical of the taxi business that operates outside hotels and resorts. They follow a queue system and assign incoming requests serially to those in the queue. Once a driver returns from such a trip, they should again stay in a queue and wait for their turn. These cabs are mostly owned by the locals from the area where the resort or hotel is located, so that the locals too benefit from these kinds of investments in their villages. There is no guarantee when their turn will come and the taxi operators confess that getting even one trip a day is considered lucky. Sometimes, their turn would come past midnight and they have to be present on such occasions. This waiting period in which these drivers are trapped makes it look like they are sitting idle throughout the day, and people often accuse them of not wanting to work, and hence charging hefty fare for one trip that should suffice for a day’s earnings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Imagine yourself in a condition where you have to provide for your family, pay monthly installments for the car loan, taxes and deductions of all kinds, save enough for a rainy day, and countless other expenses that eat away your earning. Now add to that irregular working hours, rising inflation, and an overall uncertainty that comes with unstable income. The last thing you would want to do is not work.
It is easy to characterize their idleness as a lack of desire to work while sitting in the comforts of our own financial stability. It is as if they should be blamed entirely for failing in a system that is designed to work against them. When life is this unstable, and the State is promoting big corporate players whose profit models are built on their worker’s precarity, do you expect them to not express their anger and frustration towards the system? All their actions are a desperate attempt to preserve their livelihoods, even at the risk of being anachronistic and irrelevant for refusing to participate in the newest fad of the marketplace.
What the taxi drivers in Goa have evolved is a cooperative model of doing business which is built around the community. These values are alien, and perhaps detrimental to the capitalist ways of doing business, where in the name of the free market, people often aspire to build monopolies. It is not that Goa doesn’t have app based aggregators already. There are at least two apps that are currently operating and were handed the monopoly over the Goan taxi market on a platter. Predictably, these apps have failed because the demand in Goa is not as large as compared to metropolitan cities, and moreover, it is unevenly distributed. These algorithms cannot adapt to the humane ways of doing business while coexisting. And that is what is worrying about these draft guidelines, that they are not only bringing private corporate players into this arena, but are also advancing the algorithmic takeover of our life.
An edited version of this piece was published in Scroll.in on 15 June 2025.
