Banning Cabs Is Easier Said Than Done

BENGALURU: The Karnataka government is going by the book. On Thursday, it duly followed the Centre's orders to ban Uber and other unregistered app-based car sharing service. But the moot question is: can such a ban work? For, all of Thursday, Uber and TaxiForSure apps were working and booking rides despite the directive. There are 12 aggregators having tens of thousands of cabs plying on city roads.

Uber cars have no stickers on them to make them visible for enforcers of the ban. But the government says the ban will stay and will be lifted only when aggregators register themselves. Transport commissioner Rame Gowda said, "The implementation begins in right earnest. If we find any cab plying under the banner of any of the banned cab services, the cabbie will lose his licence for another four months or so and his permits will be cancelled. Also, there are 25 other permit conditions, which will be tallied by our motor vehicle inspectors and accordingly, the fine will be levied."

An enforcement official told TOI, "The problem is to find whether a cab is working for Uber or not because the cars don't have any stickers. Today, we picked cabs at random points in the city and found many violators. There is no deadline but the enforcement will continue. On the first day, I had about 10 RTO officers and some motor vehicle inspectors with me for the enforcement drive but the times ahead are going to be tough for us too."

The department is facing shortage of motor vehicle inspectors. In all, there are 83 motor vehicle inspectors and 11 RTO officials to undertake the massive enforcement drives across the city for schoolbuses, two-door regulation for long-distance buses and now the cabs. Legal tangles over recruitment of motor vehicle inspectors have restrained them from adding staff. Across the state, there are 1,839 motor vehicle inspectors and there are 888 vacancies. The other challenge is how to stop booking of rides if the apps are functional and citizens who are satisfied with the services continue to book their ride through the app. There are many cabbies who work for more than one company and most of them have no branding on the vehicles, which is going to puzzle the officials even more.

It's not easy to ban in a virtual world, say net experts. "Banning is not a solution. But the government can simply issue a block order and force the internet service providers to pull out the apps and also make them delete the apps downloaded on phones of the users of their platform. But services like Uber are a cloud service and a shared infrastructure. So there could be collateral damage to companies whose infrastructure they use. There can be many other websites also which will not be available to the users," said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru.