The Delhi Tourism department has received 1,078 applications in the last three years in response to their invitation for registration of cabs to run as tour operators, travel agents, tourist transport operators and excursion agents in the National Capital Territory.

But, till date, not a single registration has been done.

Though there is no stated technical reason on why there have not been any registrations, it is more to do with vested transporter lobbies wanting to avoid regulation.

The Delhi government had in 2009 handed over the job of registering the transport intermediaries, such as travel agents and cab operators under Rule 81 of Delhi Motor Vehicle Rules 1993, to the Delhi Tourism Ministry.

Public notification

After the government handed over the job, the Tourism Department had invited applications through public notification for such registrations. The department had also set up a committee headed by the then Joint Secretary (Tourism), of which SP Singh of IFTRT was a member. The committee had, at that time, fixed the duties, liabilities, blacklisting, among others.

Refund

Under the registration scheme, Delhi had collected ₹1.07 crore (registration fee of ₹10,000). Of that, about ₹1 lakh has been returned to about 10 of those intermediaries, who had sought refund. This is according to information shared by RTI as on May 5.

Citing this data, IFTRT points out that it is strange that the government has not registered any players till date under this intermediary scheme despite the existing rules. “There are some 3,500-4,000 such taxi operators who ‘canvass’ their services, as per yellow pages. Many of these are not even operating with commercial number plates,” said Singh. The Road Transport and Highways Ministry norms stipulates that taxi services or the on-demand transport aggregating services have be to be registered under Section 93 of Motor Vehicle Act — basically allowing State governments and local units to frame rules for registration of transport intermediaries. This is also significant in the backdrop of recent noise regarding a regulatory vacuum to register cab aggregators. “The taxi aggregators are just canvassers as per Section 93 of the CMVA….,” he said.

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