New draft rules by the Karnataka govt for online cab aggregators: Report

Bengaluru, Feb 17: New draft rules have been recently published by the Karnataka state government for the online competing cab aggregators in the city. From now onwards, the companies who do not have a Technology aggregator service license will not be allowed to operate in the state and the drivers who are willing to work, can join other aggregators as per their convenience.

According to an exclusive report by the Medianama, the Karnataka cab aggregators have to follow the rules which are listed in the draft named 'Karnataka on Demand Transportation Technology Aggregators Rules 2016'.

The draft issue on Tuesday, Feb 9 will come into effect from 30 days of the issue date and cab aggregators have to strictly follow the state government new rules.

Earlier, many media had already covered the draft rules stating that the document was in public domain, but the documents were not available online.However, Medianama got the copy of guidelines after hardship of talking with the government official bodies.

Meanwhile, Medianama contacted the high service competing cab, Ola and Uber about new draft rules, but Uber denied to say anything and said "we will comment on it only if the guideline copy will be available online. Moreover, Ola got the hard copy from the the media and said "we will issue statement after internal team will look into this."

Here are some point of the rules:

• According to the stated rule the applicant should have a minimum of 100 taxi owned and operated by them with individual taxi permit holders.
• The applicant had to have a mandatory control room facility in their company.
• Its will be mandatory to hold display board in taxi instead the taxi with driver informations.
• The vehicles should also be fitted with tamper proof electronic digital meter.
• Its should also carry yellow colour display board with bold written word ' TAXI'
• The driver should be the resident of Karnataka for a minimum of 5 years.
• The driver should have knowlege about the Kannada and preferably other language too like English for passengers' convenience.
• The fare cannot be higher, once it is fixed by the Karnataka government.
• The drivers must be trained once in a year about the safety rules and guidelines.
• No passengers can be charged dead mileage.

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