Let's talk taxis

Who gets to profit and who gets to suffer and more as I discuss the facets of Goa's dogged taxi issue

Jan 19, 2025

This was a week in which the Goa tourism department held a ‘tourism stakeholders conclave’ followed closely by a meeting of the Goa Tourism Board, both of which seemingly sought to address Goa’s tourism issues.

After the former, state tourism minister Rohan Khaunte came out all guns blazing, essentially to say, this time with “provisional figures,” that the influencers were wrong and that in fact Goa had received a 21% growth in tourism arrivals between last year and this, with domestic arrivals growing by 22% and foreign arrivals by 3%.

In effect, according to the department’s figures, which are really just an estimation (a conservative estimate, the department insisted), Goa’s received about 1.04 crore tourists, of whom about 4.7 lakh were foreigners. Goa was growing, and the influencers were wrong, was Khaunte’s conclusion.

The statement after the board meeting was much more measured. The board “proposed regulated taxi fares at airports, railway stations, and cruise terminals, along with user-friendly service and offering uniform pricing,” besides also promising to “counter misinformation and targeted foreign media marketing campaigns.”

None of this is new. Fellow journalists recall reporting on such assurances as far back as 2004, well before Goa became the domestic tourist destination that it is today—and there is nothing to suggest that the present assurances mean anything more than those given two decades ago.

However, given that Goa’s overcharging taxi cartels are undoubtedly the main complaint by tourists on social media and online fora, and were top of the hoteliers’ agenda when they met the tourism minister at the conclave earlier this week, I thought I’d spend this week writing on the taxi issue in detail. Besides, I had said I would dedicate a separate write-up on the taxi issue itself, so…

Let’s talk taxis

A Hindustan Ambassador ‘tourist’ taxi in outside the Aguada Fort circa 1994, among the first states in the country to introduce the concept of a tourist taxi. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

But first let’s establish a few facts.

The problem with calling it a ‘tourist problem’

Taxis and public transport in general are problems in Goa. Even if you are willing to pay whatever price is asked, getting a cab can be a problem in Goa outside of a limited set of places like airports, railway stations, bus stands, and hotel lobbies.

This is a problem not just for tourists, a majority of whom, admittedly, visit locations (coastal villages) where taxis can be found in abundance, but more so for those living here who have to store multiple taxi driver contacts (multiple sets, for multiple locations). It’s a problem that has its roots in Goa’s low population density and high per capita vehicle ownership—the highest in the country, by far, with at least one vehicle per person and car ownership of 45.2% per household.

While this may seem like a good thing if you look at it from a ‘development’ point of view (Goa’s parameters are akin to those of Europe and the US), it only points to the fact that the government has been focusing on car-centric public infrastructure rather than on a public transport-centred infrastructure, which in many ways has made it hard to live if you don't have a car, just like the US.

Framing Goa’s taxi issue as a problem for tourists not only completely neglects the needs of residents but then prompts so-called solutions like “Goa Miles,” which then actually go on to only serve areas frequented by tourists (more on this later).

Secondly, it’s not as if Goans are not victims of the muscle power of Goa’s taxis either. You go to pick up a friend or relative who is staying at any starred hotel, and you will experience it yourself.

So why is the problem as big as it is in Goa? A bit of history might help understand the problem.

Who are Goa’s taxi drivers?

Most of Goa’s taxi drivers, the original ones, hail from traditionally peasant classes who were engaged in tilling and cultivating rice and vegetable fields, tending to coconut groves, etc. In effect, these were landless classes depending on agriculture for sustenance.

At the time of the dawn of tourism in Goa, when landowners showed interest in selling their lands to set up large hotels (mainly in Salcete in south Goa), where landholdings were generally larger (as compared to Bardez, home to north Goa’s beaches), the tillers, who had rights to the land thanks to the Goa Agricultural Tenancy Act, surrendered those rights on the promise that they too would benefit from the hotel being set up in the village either via jobs or through self-employment in the form of taxis.

It is this unwritten contract that ensured that Goa’s first hotels—set up in the 80s—had taxis waiting outside the lobby at a time when any form of public transport to the locations where the hotels were set up was largely absent. Goa, for those who don’t know, had a tourism industry even before it had proper air connectivity. A lone Indian Airlines flight to and from Mumbai-Goa is the sole purpose of the Dabolim airport that was resurrected, a decade after it was bombed by the Indian Air Force during Operation Vijay. It is also why chartering a flight directly to Goa was cheaper, making charters a primary source of tourists to Goa.

Times have changed, but the systems have not, and neither has the right of first refusal (for lack of a better word) that the taxi operators from the village have largely given to themselves for reasons that shall now follow.

Who gets to profit?

At the core of the taxi operators' “rent-seeking” behaviours is a need to ensure that they get a share of Goa’s tourism industry. When a huge hotel or other tourism-related establishment is set up in a village, the immediate profits go only to the landowner who sold the land for the hotel, while the rest of the village loses more than just a little—be it sewage in the fields, water scarcity, or simply a loss of what was once a freely accessible open space (even though it was privately owned) for as long as you didn’t steal the produce.

As such, Goa has always had a sense of ‘collective’ ownership of the village. Even though you didn’t own all the land in the village, the entire village was in effect ‘yours’ in the sense that you would demand to have a say in what happens or doesn’t happen within the territory. You can call it a parochial mindset, but it is what has ‘saved’ Goa (so far) from an even bigger onslaught of high-rise development.

It is not something limited to Goa, either. Across the country, and especially in tourist destinations like Shimla, certain destinations in Rajasthan, Jammu & Kashmir, etc., though admittedly the scale of overcharging is not as high as Goa,

The messaging is simple: If we don’t get to profit from the tourism in our village, we’d rather not have it. Cabbies have fought not just other cabbies but also tour buses, rented cars, and private vehicles.

Why Goa Miles hasn’t worked

In response to persistent demand for an app-based service in Goa to help the state keep pace with other parts of the world and the country with the introduction of app-based aggregators, the Goa government said it would launch its own app.

What we got, in effect, was an app-based service run by a private company, run by a relative of a former BJP MLA, that is virtually a state-endorsed monopoly paired with a clumsy interface that requires you to deposit money before you can think of booking any cabs.

But assuming that you can live with all of that, Goa Miles problems go beyond just that. Goa Miles biggest problem is the lack of availability and reliability. Trying to summon a cab while at home outside of a coastal village is next to impossible. You will be lucky if you get a cabbie to respond, even worse if it is for a short trip. As such, it appears that the company is hellbent on serving an already served portion of the market—to pick you up from the airport and drop you at your destination—thereby trying to corner for itself a part of the lucrative portion of the market already served by prepaid taxi counters.

It kind of defeats the purpose of an app-based aggregator if it is only available largely at airports, etc., while you, who are trying to book a cab from the comfort of your home, get no response. Goa Miles is more of a case of something-better-than-nothing rather than a real solution to the issue.

Which brings me to the other important aspect of the taxi business in Goa—rates.

The feeling of being cheated

Goa was the first state in the country where the concept of a tourist taxi was introduced. Prior to that, taxi rates were defined according to a rate chart depending on the number of kilometres travelled.

For e.g., according to the most recent fare notification in Goa, currently the Yellow and Black official taxi rates are as follows: ₹21 for the first kilometre and ₹18 for every subsequent kilometre. This is irrespective of the size ofthe car,r with nighttime charges being 35% higher.

Tourist taxis, on the other hand, rather than providing a point-to-point service, are allowed to take tourists on ‘tours,’ i.e., from a starting point, say a hotel, to several sightseeing destinations and bring them back to the hotel. As such, they are allowed to charge a fixed rate per four hours (half day and 50 km) or eight hours (full day and 100 km), with every additional kilometre and every additional hour incurring further charges.

They also have a point-to-point rate, ranging between ₹26 per km and ₹46 per km, depending on the kind of vehicle you hire (hatchback, sedan, MPV).

For example, in Goa, a one-way 50 km ride in a tourist taxi sedan will “officially” cost you Rs 2,000 (₹40 * 50 km). This is the official daytime rate as notified in the Gazette. The nighttime rate is 35% higher. So when tourists complain that a taxi is charging between ₹2000-2500 to hire a cab from Margao to Calangute (a distance of 47-odd kilometres), s/he is indeed being overcharged, but not by much.

A taxi for a similar distance in Mumbai will only cost ₹933, according to the official fare card, while in Delhi it will be 1020, while in Bengaluru the same distance will cost around 1385.

This explains why a trip from the Mopa airport to any destination south of Panjim is as expensive as it is, even officially.

Given the difference in official rates between Goa’s taxis and those available in metros, a tourist arriving in Goa from any one of these metros will be left with the feeling of being cheated even if the taxi operator does go by the official rate. Similarly, a foreign tourist will readily pay the asking fee because for them, the benchmark is the price they pay cabbies back home and will still walk away feeling like they got a ‘cheap ride.’. The thing with foreign tourists being willing to pay the high price is that those prices become the new norm—this is true not just for taxis but for rentals too.

It’s another matter that in Goa, even yellow and black cabs, which are only available at ‘select’ locations, also charge you the ‘tourist’ taxi rate because why not?

Further, no one, not even a Goa Miles cabbie, will want to take you for a short trip between 10-25 km and would rather hold out for a longer, more lucrative customer. They will not even look at your face for a trip that involves less than 10 km or simply charge you the cost for a longer trip anyway.

If anyone is harbouring the notion that the introduction of app-based services will help bring the rates down, now would be the time to disabuse yourself of such a notion. You will not—likely never—get the same rate as a high-density metro in a lower-density place like Goa. The introduction of app taxis will help with hailing short-distance cabs, convenience, and transparency of rates, but as for getting a lower rate, that’s unlikely to happen—certainly not in a place like Goa that has a high cost of living where even a daily wage labourer charges nothing less than ₹1,000 for eight hours of work.

Which brings me to my final point.

What do we do about this?

There are no easy solutions and no easy answers, and I can’t claim to have them. A good starting point would be to start thinking of a residents-first policy. That is, rather than trying to make tourists' lives better, could you start by making residents' lives better first? How about a pan-Goa radio taxi service at an affordable rate that will help everyone—senior citizens, those who don’t know how to drive or are too afraid to—go from point A to B in a convenient and efficient manner without having to rely on friends, husbands, children, grandchildren, or neighbours to drop and pick them up?

Further, Goa’s cabbies are getting away with their ‘high’ rates simply because the populace—residents and tourists alike—have no other option. Their high rates are more a factor of how much you are willing to pay to avoid the inconvenience of using Goa’s still-stuck-in-the-80s bus system than any other desire to loot. Rather than spending ₹1,000s of crores on car-centric, fat-ass highways that allow you to drive from the north to the south of Goa within one and a half hours without seeing anything, if the government were to spend a fraction of that amount on a better bus system that is reliable, efficient, and keeps pace with changing demographics and population centres, watch how the taxi rates will drop on their own.

Instead, we have a government that is talking about building a metro in Goa. I guess you can’t get kickbacks from a bus system.

GERARD’s Gazette

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