Sudhir Kumar seems to be a jovial man. Employed by a prominent cab aggregation service in the national capital region (NCR), the 25-year-old “driver-partner” puts his training-inspired salutations on display as soon you enter his white, hatchback vehicle with a smile thrown in for good measure every now and then.

The eldest of four siblings, including two younger sisters “nearing the threshold of marriageable age”, the class VIII drop-out says he decided not to settle for his family vocation of farming and cajoled his father into coughing up his share of the property to buy a diesel vehicle, which he could operate as a cab in the NCR in September last year. Its the first step, his eyes shine as he speaks, in his ambition to have his own little taxi business. “But my first priority is getting my sisters married. If all goes well, I’ll be able to contribute at least for the marriage of the elder one of the two...” Kumar trails off as we are flagged down by a traffic policeman on National Highway – 8.

The practised smile on his face disappears as he struggles to hide the large-screen mobile device running a GPS-powered route app – arguably the only tangible proof of his association with the vehicle aggregation service which has employed him – in the glove compartment, getting his hands on some documents before looking up and pleading that he be identified as a driver from the local taxi stand.

“This is what I was referring to; village folk like me wouldn’t have spent our savings on diesel cars if we knew the government in Delhi would just wake up one day and decide to punish us for the crime of one particular driver,” he complains dropping an implicit reference to the rape of a private executive aboard an Uber taxi in November last year.

Livelihoods at stake

The Hindu spoke to a cross-section of drivers with All India Tourist Permits (AITPs) employed by platforms such as Uber, Ola and Taxi4Sure, company officials and government functionaries in a reality check of the ban on web app-based taxi services over a period of several days.

According to conservative estimates, approximately 35,000 livelihoods swing between legality and criminal liability due to the diesel engines under the hoods of the vehicles which they drive on a daily basis across the NCR.

This, even as government sources admit that the service they provide significantly helps in checking the vacuum that exists in addressing the issue of last-mile connectivity, the police claim they struggle with the enforcement of the ban on a daily basis and industry experts argue diesel, as a fuel, is no longer as villainous an alternative than it was a decade ago.

Catch-22 for policy makers

Though they believe service providers such as Uber, Ola and Taxi4Sure among others should have made efforts to “conform to laws governing the Delhi government’s decision to shift to CNG 15 years ago” the government needed to revisit and perhaps rethink its stand on the issue. Uber, Ola ready to help

The advent of better engine and emission technology, an Uber representative said, made it possible to “strike a reasonable balance between the interests of the stakeholders involved.”

An Ola spokesperson said there were at least 25,000 licensed driver-partners who used the Ola app to serve customers on a daily basis and the company was looking forward to a favorable resolution and clarity soon.