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“If the fuel price rises, shouldn’t the fare increase too?” asked Shaan, a 30-year-old cab driver, on Monday, July 27, as a 12-hour protest unfolded across Kolkata. He was among the drivers who stayed offline between 6 am and 6 pm as the Centre of Indian Trade Unions-affiliated Kolkata App Cab Drivers and Operators Union gathered at Ramlila Park and marched to the state transport department  to submit a charter of demands.

The charter summarises what platform workers in India experience daily and what they are owed. Alongside the call for higher fares – minimum rates of Rs 30 per kilometre for air-conditioned cabs and Rs 25 for non-air-conditioned ones, against the current Rs 10-12 rate – the union demands that the state restructure fares in line with petrol and diesel prices, resolve Kolkata’s compressed natural gas (CNG) fuel station shortage, provide options other than E-20 fuels and keep private vehicles out of commercial ride-sourcing.

These are not demands directed at Uber and Rapido alone, but also at the state as an infrastructure provider: workers expect the state to build the refuelling network, regulate the fare and stop shifting the costs of energy policy onto workers who are already in precarious situations.

CNG: Late arrival and high prices

CNG entered Indian transport policy through the force of judicial activism. On July 28, 1998, the Supreme Court in M.C. Mehta v. Union of India, acting on the Bhure Lal Committee’s recommendations, directed Delhi’s entire public transport fleet to convert to CNG – a public health measure enforced against the backdrop of the national capital’s massive air pollution. 

Kolkata, a city which is largely polluted, took a different route because eastern India had limited CNG gas infrastructure to switch to. The Calcutta high court intervened in July 2008 and banned commercial vehicles registered before January 1, 1993, from the Kolkata Metropolitan Area, later pushed to July 31, 2009, and ordered petrol autorickshaws to be replaced with liquified petroleum gas (LPG).

Photo: Ashique Thuppilikkat.

The city’s first two CNG pumps were commissioned only on March 22, 2021, one by Indian Oil in New Town and another by Bharat Petroleum in Garia, with gas supply from Bengal Gas Company, a Gas Authority of India Limited–West Bengal government joint venture. Drivers converted in significant numbers as the wage arithmetic was persuasive. Though conversion of petrol vehicles to CNG costed Rs 40,000-45,000, leaving up the boot to a cylinder space, running costs fell to roughly Rs 3 per kilometre against Rs 7 per kilometre with petrol (with CNG then at Rs 67.67 per........

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