Autos taking Mysoreans for a ride

It was in 2008, SOM had published my detailed article titled Woes of Auto Consumers (see below). It had discussed both the problems faced by auto consumers as well as the terrible problems of auto drivers in earning enough to meet their daily requirements. It will not come as a surprise to any one if the concerned authorities or political leadership has failed to take steps to solve this consumer problem which has been affecting most Mysoreans.

At that time there were about 17000 registered autos in the city. In addition there were thousands of unregistered autos. During the last four years, number of autos serving Mysore must have gone up considerably. With that problems faced by auto consumers have also gone up. While prepaid taxi services at the bus stand and railway station has certainly helped the consumers, for others it is nightmare to ride auto.

As a regular user of autos, I have the first hand experience of getting cheated by them. Even for less than the minimum distance they demand Rs. 20 because petrol price has gone up. Actually most if not all autos run now on LPG whose price if any thing has remained more or less the same or has gone up only marginally. This is because the auto LPG price fluctuate with the international crude oil price whereas petrol price was liberalized since 18 months.

Many autos refuse to start the meter. The standard reply is that the meter is not working or it has just broken. If they happen to use the meter, more than likely it would have been deliberately set to jump.

Now that we have a campaign to fight corruption in our city, can we take steps to eliminate or at least reduce corruption in the auto rickshaw sector? Autos cheat the consumers because they are unable to earn enough. This is because there are a number of unregistered autos. Why cant the concerned authorities take steps to stop this menace? I have been told that when an unregistered auto is caught he pays a fine of Rs 100 which of course is passed on to consumers. We do not know how much mamul they have to pay in addition. When autos go for registration or meter calibration, no work will get done without paying a bribe. This again is collected finally from the consumers.

Unless we ensure that most auto drivers can earn enough for their living as suggested above, woes of auto consumers will only get worse.

Woes of Auto Consumers.
Bhamy V. Shenoy, Mysore Grahakara Parishat

In our city, it will be very difficult to find one auto whose meter is working properly. It is equally difficult to find any auto consumer who feels he or she has not been cheated excepting when prepaid autos are used at bus and railway stations. This is a statement based on my personal experience. I use auto often and have bitter experience of being cheated by most of them. However there are rare cases, they accept the right fare when I complain to them about faulty meter, show my knowledge of the actual distance traveled and my association with MGP.

I have a lot of sympathy for the auto drivers. I suspect many of them are not able to earn subsistence living even after putting many hours. They are forced by our cruel and corrupt system to pay bribe to authorities (mostly police according to them) despite their poor earnings. Some of them may even belong to below poverty level category. But this does not give them the right to cheat the consumers and also abuse us. Every day battles are fought with the auto drivers as customers alight at their destination in every part of the city. This is very unfortunate and should be avoided. Today auto travel has become a nightmare. As a result I have been now travelling by public transportation whenever it is possible.

To throw more light on this problem, I have attempted to compute the economics of auto drivers (see table). I had to make many educated estimates even after collecting information from a group of auto drivers. Still the results may fairly represent the economic problems faced by auto drivers.

My computations show that a typical auto driver making six daily trips of average 5 kilometers (total paid distance traveled of 30 Kms) using LPG at official price of Rs. 350 per 5.5 KG tank can earn Rs 1959 per month. His monthly income will fall to Rs. 1465 if he has to use petrol. This income though above the BPL, is not enough for a family of four. However if an auto driver makes trips for just 50 kilometers then his monthly income after all expenses will be Rs 5559 and Rs 4672 for LPG and petrol fueled vehicles respectively. With more than 15600 registered and several thousands unregistered autos in the city, not many drivers will be lucky to get enough trips to cover daily distance of 50 kms. Even at lower number of trips, amount of revenues generated in auto sector is more than Rs 28 laks per day.

A critical study of auto sector mirrors many corruption problems faced by our society. Since driving an auto does not require much skill, even unemployable college graduates are attracted towards this sector. It is easy to get bank financing for auto purchases. However when an auto driver finds that he is unable to make both ends meet, he starts to break the laws. He tampers with the meters to collect higher fare. He is unable to maintain his auto in good condition. Since he knows he is breaking the law or not in compliance with the vehicle rules, police and RTO are able to collect their mamuls from them.

Instead of using petrol, he uses subsidized kerosene to blend with petrol to operate his autos. He also has access to the so called MS petrol which is cheaper despite knowing it is illegal. The difference between auto LPG and residential LPG is so huge (Rs 31.82 versus 10.55 per liter) that many autos run on LPG allocated for residential use. This creates an LPG shortage for residential consumers. Auto sector is one where LPG dealers can make a killing by diverting their allotted residential LPG.

Mysore Grahakara Parishat has asked the metrology department in Deputy Commissioners office to do a random check of autos to detect meter tampering. Of course this is a hopeless task since most have tampered meters today. Still if auto drivers know that there will be an inspection and heavy penalty will be imposed if found guilty, things could improve.

Another alternative is for Police/RTO/DCs office to publish a booklet giving distances between important places. Third alternative is to force the autos to change over to digital meters with distances when time comes for replacement. All these strategies will be of little use, unless we as a society study the basic problem to help the auto drivers to earn enough money to make both ends meet. Now who should take this lead? Unfortunately officials in charge do not seem to have any concern about this issue. It is also equally the fault of consumers that we have failed to contact the officials with our grievances. Just increasing the fare will not solve the problem.

Bhamy V Shenoy, MGP