Tyranny of the Union

FOR THE TOURIST who once found in Goa a near virgin green landscape mixed with a culture of wel­come tolerance and easy leisure, the law of diminishing returns caught up long ago. Crowds increased, urbanisation spread, hotels, and shacks proliferated, and locals became increasingly irri­tated. Even so, it remains still one of the finer places to go to and the economy still gets its oxygen from tourism. Ordi­narily, what usually gets better, despite the other deteriorations, is transport, but Goa has made it an anomaly.

The government recently tried to sabotage Uber introducing its services by filing a case against it because permis­sion was allegedly neither sought nor given. That is only half the story. Goa, everyone agrees, is an ordeal when it comes to taxis. They charge exorbitant rates and what is legally fixed by the government is not worth the paper it is written on. The taxi drivers, through the union, also keep a stranglehold on the roads ensuring that the usual rules of markets, like competition and price discovery, are not allowed to take root. The Goa government going against Uber is probably in service to pampering this constituency even though Uber was only doing airport transfers for now.

You would think taxi or auto drivers would not be a big enough constituency to swing government decisions because of the limited votes at stake but that is far from the case. Not just in Goa but almost everywhere in India, they have outsized influence. One of the first groups that the Aam Aadmi Party got on its side was autorickshaw drivers in its journey to win Delhi. Small becomes big when it is organised and speaks in one voice. They can bring in both a guaranteed number and also finance. But in transport, it comes at a cost for the people who have to travel on those roads. It would be a mistake to think that only tourists suffer because of the unionising of taxi drivers. The local Goans, too, have to bear this tyranny. The only ones who are unaffected are the extremely wealthy, who either have their own vehicles or can afford luxury private taxis where the price is irrelevant.

Unionising merging into outright extortion is not much of an excep­tion. In Kerala villages, a practice called nookukooli still prevails in which you might have a cargo com­ing by truck and choose to unload it yourself, but will still have to pay the local labourers just because they have decided to appoint themselves sole custodians of this profession. Because they are unionised, are part of local political outfits, and underpin this demand with the potential of violence, most accede to this extortion. Uber is aware of the power of drivers’ unions and has disrupted it worldwide. They have done so in other parts of India and chances are they will not be pushed off easily in Goa. But it shouldn’t be made so difficult to introduce something that so evidently benefits everyone only be­cause a handful wants to keep the clock from ticking. But time and technology eventually catch up with everyone, including taxi drivers.

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