Hyderabad: New Year’s Eve revellers in the city will not be able to get drunk and then book a cab home to avoid checking by the police, because taxi drivers have announced that they will stop services from Thursday midnight until their demands regarding the private taxi aggregators, Ola and Uber, are met.
The Telangana Cab Drivers and Owners Association (TCDOA) announced on Thursday that they will stop services, and taxi drivers will not allow Ola and Uber cabs to ply. The TCDOA said that the city has about 1.2 lakh cabs of which 90,000 are running under Ola and Uber, which will not serve from Thursday midnight.
The association’s president, Shiva Vulkundakar, held a press conference where he alleged that both Ola and Uber have cheated drivers under the driver-cum-owner scheme.
“As the number of taxis is increasing, the existing taxi drivers are not getting proper bookings, yet they must pay daily instalment of about '1,000 to the management. Managements are behaving like a monopoly, allotting bookings to the drivers-cum-owners and diverting a majority of bookings to their own vehicles,” he said.
“We are demanding that new cabs and leased cars not be added in order to provide minimum bookings to existing cab drivers. We are demanding that share bookings be cancelled. The managements should give guaranteed bookings up to 12 during peak hours for at least five years for each cab,” the president said.
