Union Home Minister and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah on Saturday said Bharat Taxi will expand to over 500 cities including Nagpur, Pune, Mumbai, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Jaipur and Kolkata, within the next two years, even as he accused app-based private cab aggregators of temporarily lowering prices and offering higher commissions to drivers to prevent the growth of the collaborative ride-sharing platform, saying the strategy will fail.
Speaking at the launch of Bharat Taxi operations in Gujarat at Mahatma Mandir in Gandhinagar, Shah said that rival companies were willing to incur losses for a limited period to prevent the cooperative platform from making further progress.
“Wherever Bharat Taxi arrives, competing companies temporarily reduce prices by incurring losses. This can last only for a year or two. Companies that lower prices and offer temporarily higher commissions to Sarathis are only doing so to halt the progress of Bharat Taxi,” Shah said.
Bharat Taxi is India’s first cooperative-led driver-owned ride-hailing service, which was launched to provide a fairer alternative to traditional auto aggregators. Backed by the central government and major cooperatives, it operates on a zero-commission model where drivers are the owners of the platforms and keep the full fare.
The service has been launched in 14 cities in Gujarat, including Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara and Rajkot. Shah said Bharat Taxi will start operations in seven major cities by July 31 and expand to over 500 cities across the country over the next two years.
He also said that more than seven lakh drivers, called ‘Sarathis’, have joined the platform through purchase $100 shares and has served more than 37 thousand customers.
The home minister alleged that the companies wanted Bharat Taxi out of the market so that it could later revert to “abusive practices”.
“They want Bharat Taxi to leave the field so that they can once again start abusive practices. Their wish will never be fulfilled. Bharat Taxi will continue to move forward with service determination, strength of collaboration and Sarathi trust,” he added.
He claimed that existing aggregators are charging high commissions, delaying payments and suspending drivers without listening to them. Appealing to drivers not to be tempted by temporary incentives, Shah said Bharat Taxi will never exploit them as it is “their own cooperative enterprise”.
The minister said the cooperative model will also provide drivers with access to low-interest loans, insurance and financial support to expand their businesses.
Operations control mission
