More Trouble For Ola & Uber, Govt. To Issue New Laws For Cab Hailing Apps: Report

Latest in the cab-hailing apps’ market; a new set of legal guidelines have been issued to settle the ever upheaving chaos in this space.

According to the new guidelines, all ride-hailing services should be fitted with emergency safety buttons and in-app features allowing passengers to call the police in emergencies. (as reported by FT).

Also, the companies like Uber and  Ola, who aggregate hundreds of thousands of new drivers onto their platforms,will now be required to  conduct strict criminal background checks, including verification of the drivers as – “good charactered.” Similar guidelines were issued in China last week.

Ola and Uber has welcomed the issue of the laws in good spirit. Bangalore-based Ola, said in a press statement, “We welcome the advisory from the Ministry of Road Transport and we believe this is a major step towards positively impacting the ecosystem and its stakeholders, that technology platforms like ours have created. We will continue to work with the government, under the aegis of this progressive directive, offering our complete support and commitment towards building mobility for a billion people.”  

Ola’s global contemporary, Uber told FT, “It is a big leap towards recognising sector-specific regulations for technology-based ride-hailing services in India.”

Legalisation of Taxi Hailing apps has been a topic of constant debate since the Delhi Government’s ban on Uber after the horrific Delhi rape incident. Following which, Ola stopped operations in Delhi for a month but resumed services in January after applying for a radio-taxi licence while other aggregators continued operations. Government even passed an order to Department of Electronics and Information technology(DEITY) to ban these apps but to the cabs’ relief , Internet Service Providers (ISPs) expressed inablility to comply with its directive URLs of four websites including Uber, Olacabs, TaxiForSure and Angel Broking.
Also, there have been cases of protests by the traditional taxi operators asking for generalised radio taxi laws in the country.

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