While one Hyderabadi man actually has the nerve to put in an outrageous request to Ola Cabs for a Hindu driver, which was thankfully denied, the request of women for safe cab drivers is still a pipe dream it seems. Two days ago, a 28-year-old businesswoman from Mumbai tweeted about a ‘scary experience’ that she and her mother endured during a cab ride from Five Bungalows in Matunga to Dadar.
The duo hailed a black and yellow cab from Matunga and it was only after he began driving that they noticed that the driver behaving strangely. He would suddenly laugh hysterically and light a wax image on the dashboard, extinguish the flame and then light it again. He did this six or seven times while driving, which alarmed the duo.
The tweet has gone viral online, once again bringing the issue of safety in cabs to the public forum. The Uber rape may have provoked outrage at the time of the incident, but little else has been done after that to ensure clean driver profiles by vetting them.
The strange behaviour of the cab driver is just one episode. Most kaali-peeli cab rides always bring with them experiences of rude drivers, refusals to ferry passengers to any destination, rash driving, and in some cases, even assaults. Little wonder then, that even after the Uber rape incident, passengers continue to opt for app-based cab services over the daily nuisance of flagging down a kaali-peeli.
But even among the private cab services, driver vetting leaves much to be desired. The point in evidence being that in the aftermath of the Uber rape, Mumbai police undertook a background investigation of 26,901 cab drivers, public and private, according to Indian Express. Of them, only 836 managed to get character certificates from the Mumbai police.
That apart, after the Uber incident, the Maharashtra Transport Commissioner, Mahesh Zagade had directed all cabs plying, whether public or private, to install a safety button for use by the passenger. In the event of an untoward incident, the passenger can press the button and an alarm would be relayed to the police as well as the cab service aggregator’s control room along with GPS coordinates. But how far they have been complied with is another issue altogether.
Image Courtesy: Reuters
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