Hiring a cab is an easy task these days with competing taxi
hailing apps and aggregators promoting their services aggressively in major
Indian cities. This week I hired a cab from one of the major taxi aggregator
companies. Though late by a few minutes I got into this taxi driven by a
youngster in his mid-twenties. As soon
as I sat in the car the driver gave his smart phone to me and asked me to type
the destination details on the GPS page. This, in fact, impressed me and I thought
it was a good idea so that the communication gap can be avoided and the rest of
the things will be handled by the device and the driver.
I sat back and started reading the day’s business newspaper.
In a few minutes, I realise that the driver has taken a slightly unusual turn
at a traffic junction. Some drivers do such detours to avoid a busy junction
and take the next available turn to get back to the main line. Hence, I did not
want to interfere with the navigation. Soon I realised that the driver drove
past the next flyover and didn’t bother to take a turn under the bridge.
Instead, he drove straight into one of the notorious traffic junctions beating
all logic. The route was longer by five KMs and slower by at least 25 minutes
at around 10.20 a.m. This is when I thought I must ask him if he really knew
the route. He could not talk to me in any language familiar to me. However, on
my repeated request he told me in broken English that he came from Mysore only about
a month ago to Bangalore and not familiar with the city.
Though I was significantly inconvenienced by the
inexperience of the driver, I appreciate the positive spirit of the youngster
in moving to a larger city to build a career. Possibly, he had to take this
decision to get away from a much better and liveable small town to a terribly
crowded, highly polluted and more expensive city because he could not have a
gainful occupation in his beautiful town. Our vision of smart cities is still a
dream. Too many smart people leave their better towns and villages to add to
the chaos of the bigger and dirtier cities.
Now, let me cite another taxi experience I had in 2002. On
my first trip to China I landed in the Beijing airport late in the
evening. Obviously I had no knowledge of
Mandarin and language seemed a bigger barrier than the Great Wall. I came out
of the airport with a slip of paper in my pocket having the name and address of
the hotel I was to stay. Here comes the taxi driven by a lady who was fully
protected by iron grills around the driver seat. However, the lady was
confident and took the destination address from me and without asking any
question drove me straight to the hotel lobby (it was not nearby the airport)
showed me the bill, took the cash in Yuan and drove away. Unlike my Bangalore
trip, this one started with anxiety (due to my complete unfamiliarity) but
ended in a pleasant experience in a totally unfamiliar place. Possibly this
lady driver was an experienced professional. Despite not knowing English, her
knowledge of the roads and destinations in the city helped her do her core job
well- to reach her customers safely and quickly to the destination. She had the
maps (printed on paper) but no smart phone, no GPS. But she knew her job.
I would not like to blame the youngster from Mysore. He has
the ambition to strive and achieve his goals in life. It is just that he may
have to struggle hard in an environment that is pushing people without
sufficient support systems. For instance, it would have been easier for him had
his company took some time to familiarise him with the city roads and ways to
better navigate the traffic at different times of the day. It would have been
easier for him if he had detailed printed maps of different localities of the
cities with pictures of key destinations and key routes. We see these things in
most of the world cities even in the days of Google maps and GPS. Giving a
cheap smart phone loaded with a company App is not everything for a semi-
educated migrant from a small town. In a hurry to sign up as many drivers as
possible these aggregators make life miserable for these youngsters and many
customers. Skilling India is not only about creating some factory technicians
and software engineers. It is also about equipping millions of aspiring youth
entering millions of organised and unorganised service jobs. This too is the
soft power we need to develop besides Yoga, Ayurveda and Bharatanatyam.
