Autorickshaws will go on a one-day strike on April 16
News — By The Desk on April 13, 2012 at 10:38 AMTimes of India: Autorickshaws in the city will go on a one-day strike on April 16 to protest against compulsion to install electronic meters and also to press various other demands.
The decision was taken after a meeting of the representatives of autorickshaw unions in the city with top officials of the state transport department on Thursday in Mumbai.
Nitin Pawar, convenor of Rickshaw Panchayat Pune Pimpri-Chinchwad, said: “Autorickshaws in the city will be off the roads on April 16 and a rally will be taken out at the office of the district collector. We will decide our future course of action on the same day.”
Pawar said that many issues were discussed at the meeting in the presence of the state transport department principal secretary Shailesh Kumar Sharma and transport commissioner V N More. “The government has agreed to set up a new committee that will create a new formula to decide fares of autorickshaws in the state. The existing formula is not scientific and, hence, not acceptable to any autorickshaw union in the state. The new committee would consider the cost of living and inflation while calculating the fare structure and fare hike,” he said.
Pawar added that the government has agreed to consider autorickshaw as a school students’ transport vehicle. Like the school transport bus policy, the government will work out a policy for autorickshaws. The government has also promised to initiate steps to address issue of the sudden rise in the third-party insurance premium of autorickshaws.
“We expect the government to initiate concrete steps to address these issues in the near future,” Pawar said.
Autorickshaw unions from Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai have already announced an indefinite strike from April 16 to press the demand for revision of fares. Pawar said that the union leaders including Baba Adhav and Sharad Rao were present at Thursday’s meeting.
Pawar said that the electronic meters were not tamper proof. The unions have filed a petition in the Supreme Court against the recent notification making electronic meters compulsory in autorickshaws, he added.
