Frederick Noronha
If you go by what’s said in cyberspace, you would quickly conclude that our taxi drivers in Goa are a foul-mouthed, lazy, cheating and unreliable lot. They deserve little sympathy, and if they overcharge us the consumers it’s obvious that they are earning a huge stash for themselves, concealed somewhere.
To be truthful, I have myself often felt overcharged while travelling by taxi in Goa. Thus many of us employed in Goa might not take a taxi unless absolutely necessary.
We do get somewhat overcharged by taxi drivers in other parts of the country too. (Overseas, often, things are far more standard, and you have fixed rates for such travel. But then, we get our pockets picked in other ways there. The rupee-conversion rates are dismal, and keep falling all the time. Besides, their own official rates are anyway phenomenally high, or so we feel.)
Then, don’t we get put to the taxi-test, whenever we visit a new or strange city in India? “Kaisa jaana?” how-do-we-get-to-your-destination, the taxi driver would ask you or me. When we fumble around for an answer, he knows we’re new to the place. So, he simply takes us on a circuitous route! Anyway, I don’t grumble too much but take that in my stride. The extra rupees charged I treat as a kind of ‘guiding’ fee. He’s showing me around his city. He’s finding the place I need to go to. Why not pay a bit extra?
But, when it comes to Goa, we treat our taxi-vallo rather differently. I do agree they overcharge. It also sometimes seems that they prefer not to do business, to continue playing their game of cards, rather than work for their money.
The fact here is that even if taxis in Goa overcharge, most of them make a pittance for a livelihood. I’ve heard the argument that quite a number of vehicles are controlled by powerful chains, and not single owners. But this could well be just propaganda; my own roadside encounters suggests that most taxis are operated by struggling individuals, fighting to cope with ever-escalating petrol costs, to keep body and soul together, and to feed their families.
The middle-class solution to our taxi crisis is simple: get in Uber and Ola. Nobody seems to be reading the debate over what Uber and Ola mean to the people they work with, in the rest of the world.
That apart, we don’t seem to see the other issues connected with the issue here. We only blame our taxi-drivers. Why not blame the geography and the scattered nature of the population in Goa, which means they can mostly get no return fares. Or, they have to literally fight over the same.
Why not blame our political class and bureaucracy as well, who give the impression to unemployed youth that they can go on buying any number of vehicles and the tourist plus local demand will somehow keep on sustaining them?
Or, for that matter, our intelligentsia who keep arguing that Goa only needs luxury and well-heeled tourists, and that tourism is for Goa but not for the small man whose only stake in it is the four wheels he owns?
If I feel overcharged by our taxis, there are many other reasons behind that. Let’s give it a thought, and not just blame it all on the meanness or selfishness of the taxi owner/driver.
Some of the Goa IT groups on WhatsApp recently discussed a Goa Tourism Development Corporation initiative to create a mobile app for ‘app-based taxis in Goa’. The GTDC has invited expressions of interest from software developers and taxi aggregators to develop a ‘taxi hailing system’ for Goa. It is expected to function using GPS coordinates and ‘shall abide by latest specifications’.
Online, there are some options already, such as UberClone, among others. One hopes that officialdom takes this problem seriously, and really tries to come up with a solution, not just hold out a fig-leaf to distract from the problem at hand.
Yes, we feel taxis have overpriced themselves. But why? I have also encountered taxi drivers who have helped carry my bedridden father down the stairs of our family home when he needed to visit the hospital for a change of a catheter. Or, others who have taken the pet dog in their vehicles, lovingly and carefully, when she needed medical attention quite some distance away.
They are human too, they have their needs. Goan society has a duty to somehow find the solutions.