Companies like Uber and Ola have been doing extremely good business in India, seeing a rapid spike in their name recognition. The business has been so good that Uber claims Kolkata is its fastest growing market after the US and has better growth than London. After Kolkata, Mumbai is its second fastest growing market and other Indian cities aren’t far behind.
Services like these have undercut the business of the traditional licensed and tax-paying taxis in many parts of the world. The same goes for India. The app-based hired-car business model has been termed unfair by taxi drivers, taxi owners and unions, who have protested against companies like Uber in places as far apart as South Africa and France. Regular taxis are often almost a part of the public sector, given the control that the government has in many aspects of its business, including determination of fares. With such growth in a certain sector of the private transport business, one might wonder about the state of public transport in the cities of India.
A very intensive study called The Future of Urban Motility 2.0, covering 84 large cities worldwide, has come with up a ranking of these cities. The study does not limit itself to hegemonic notions of ‘advancement’ but also takes into account crucial aspects like "share of trips made in public transport, smart card penetration, road density, frequency of public transport and initiatives taken in the public sector." Hong Kong was ranked best among the 84 cities. Among the Indian cities, Kolkata scored the best and ranked 31, with higher scores than New York, Montreal, Toronto and Sydney. The city has the lowest rate of private care ownership among major cities of the country. Mumbai, ranked second among Indian cities, scoring better than Washington DC while Chennai scored better than Los Angeles. Delhi fared badly, ranking as the fifth worst among all 84 cities.
However counter-intuitive it may seem, it is not a coincidence that the two Indian cities that ranked best in public transport are also the top cities when its comes to giving a record boost to a certain kind of private transport service expansion.
Significant sections of India’s cities have always been divided— by class, caste and various other parameters. A relatively elite class, which is not rich enough to always travel in their own cars but maintains a costly lifestyle, often has to submit to public transport. There they get pushed to share space with a class of people they would otherwise never associate with. Instant hire app-based car services provide them a separation from the public, in a real sense of space, such that they do not have to travel inside the same vehicle.
Secondly, it also separates them from the public through time. Due to 24 hour car services, they can fashion their lifestyles around hours when public transport is thin (say late night hours). The regular users of anytime-anywhere-car classes form a very small sliver of the population. Uber or Ola caters perfectly to this particular psychosocial ‘need’ for separations in space and time.
Unfortunately, the influence of this class on ‘public’ discourse on every issue is disproportionately high. It is due to this skewed/ lop-sided nature of influence that a question as important as women’s safety in public spaces can be hijacked and reduced to banning Uber and background check of drivers of these businesses.
A staggering majority of Indian women in urban public spaces have nothing to do with private transport, owned or paid, whatsoever. Whenever these influential sections log out of certain public services, the maintenance of those services go down. The government then reallocates some of the resources, meant for more democratic public services, to those kinds of services that will disproportionately benefit the creamy layer. The deterioration of better-in-the-past institutions like government hospitals and government schools are a living testament to this and it cannot be unrelated to the creation and expansion of alternative institutions to provide quality healthcare and education to the elite.
Considering this with the government’s aggressive promotion of owning private cars through subsidies, makes one wonder what implications the spectacular rise of Uber and Ola have for the chaotic but generally efficient urban public transport services. More crucially, what are the implications of having government priority influenced by a class that aspires to physically separate itself from the greater public?
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