Ola Uber Allez: Fare Turned Unfair!

Ola Uber Allez! Fare Turned Unfair

There is something fascist about surge pricing. It says I’ve got you over a barrel and so!

Kejriwal of Delhi, definitely not my favourite uncle, any more than Siddaramaiah of Karnataka, who’s impounded some 30 Uber/Ola cabs for nonsense surge pricing, have both got this one right.   

All the twaddle about algorithms and variable pricing, private enterprise, based on surges of demand in micro localities, where the cabs may or may not hover in sufficient numbers, are just so much rapacious talk about taking unfair advantage. Particularly in cruelly congested cities like Bengaluru and Delhi, with grossly inadequate public transport.

Walk away a bit, some commentators helpfully suggest, get away from the hot spots and ask the app again.

This Ola/Uber outrage has been hastily withdrawn at government threat, out of guilt and prudence, if not remorse. Meanwhile, the government in the city state continues to play ducks and drakes with pollution control.

And this, by picking on soft targets- persecuting the freedoms of private car owners who have paid road tax, all 15 years worth, to presumably drive their cars as they please.

Meanwhile, the Communists at the Green Tribunal, aided and abetted by the Supreme Court, have gleefully banned the registration of large, frightfully expensive SUVs, purchased, no doubt by the masses, at over a crore of rupees each.

They are also out to sting those numerous and modestly placed, with the temerity to buy new diesel vehicles, of any size whatsoever, with a new, 30% punitive tax!  

For the rest, the Delhi government does not know how to stop heinously polluting out-station trucks, roaring into the city every night, killing anybody in the way, not one less than a copiously spewing 15.

Nor can it dare to attack the loads of two to four-stroke engined motorcycles that buzz like flies over the streets. Or the cancer generating CNG vehicles; and certainly not the fat cat VIP cars.  

The pollution statistics meanwhile, are proving stubborn. They are little impressed with this much advertised scheme, colluding sometimes with summer breezes, sometimes not.

The Ola and Uber cab saga is meant to be about demand and supply. But, when it leans on an artificial demand created by the hubris of a state administration, it is out of whack.

There is nothing capitalist about this. It is old fashioned profiteering from protectionism – a neo licence-permit raj, particularly if this goes odd-even every month as is being threatened.

Just as well that Ola-Uber have beat a hasty retreat for now. Even as the so called free-market believers, are sulking at their scam coming apart, and allegedly refusing to ply.

It is back to the black and yellow, the three-wheeled scooter, the regulated rogues and thieves of old, who have become ubiquitous and part of our popular culture. They’ve been trying their hand at daylight robbery since time immemorial, given half a chance at breaking the law.

The argument that consumers can take it or leave this new-fangled 2X, 3X, 4X pricing from Ola/Uber, begs the question about how is this workable, never mind the strenuous justificatory babble? Why not the devil you know, if this is all? The solution may be in issuing more scooter-rickshaw licences and sending these people packing.

Sure, these foreign inspired aggregators, with billions in play, have tried to corner market share by loss-leader pricing, but nobody asked them to do so. And expensive other goods don’t justify variable pricing on the basis of how many people want to buy!

Agreed that this is a perishable, but gouge pricing at the other end of the stick cannot sustain. But then, odd-even dobara, or nine-times-out-of- ten, is not normal, every-day conditionality either.

But at the nub it is Ola-Uber’s very own devilish streak at play, disguised as free market work with air conditioning. And this in a quasi-socialist/semi-liberalised country, uncomfortable in both worlds, with more codicils and exceptions than straight laws. And a legal system that is broken.

Bleeding VC money profusely from their subsidies, despite deep pockets, Ola/Uber has withdrawn its ‘incentives’ to its free-lancing drivers/cabs.

But maybe it told its cabbies, before it called a halt, that it’s okay to go on a limited spree of loot, rapine, and pillage, just until Kejriwal uncle calls off his Mengele style experiment.

But clean air apart, the next time, Ola/Uber must try conning a less price sensitive people. Most inconveniently, they happen to know their onions, out in the sun, or listing in the shade; and so do their political masters.

For: The Quint

(752 words)

April 20^th, 2016

Gautam Mukherjee