Team Herald
CANACONA: Canacona, being an international tourist destination, lot of locals saw a window of opportunity to make a living by opting for tourist taxi trade.
If you enjoyed reading this article, you can help support our journalism by adding OHeraldo as a preferred source.
However, little did they know that a day would arrive and take away with it all the guests like a tsunami. The current Coronavirus pandemic have left them rue the day they took the decision
Some of the tourist taxi owners, among the over a thousand in Canacona Taluka, who this correspondent spoke to, said that COVID-19 pandemic has devastated their business as well as their only source of living.
Everyone is concerned about migrants and big industrialists. No one has, till today, come forward to show any compassion and solidarity towards us as we stare at an unsecured future in these unprecedented times, lamented an aggrieved taxi owner.
“Tourism in Canacona is a three-month affair while rest of the months we pay the bank instalments from the money earned during these three months,” said Nilesh Naik, a taxi owner from Rajbag, Canacona.
In view of the collapse of economy, both rural and urban due to COVID-19 pandemic, in order to give some relief to the borrowers, Reserve Bank of India has announced that the lenders are permitted to allow a 3-month moratorium on payment of instalments.
Most of the taxi owners, who had borrowed money from financial institutions, believe that the moratorium for the repayment of loans, won’t benefit them.
They are concerned with COVID-19 affecting the entire world putting the economy in turmoil. It will take years, they say, for the tourism business on which their trade depends, to reach up the level to where it was a few months ago.
“With no tourists we won’t get trips even after the lockdown is lifted,” lamented Naik.
“My bank has already deducted April instalment for the loan I availed to buy my taxi from my account. I have to also to pay my housing loan instalment, it’s a huge burden for us. How can we come out of the situation without financial support from the government? It is a huge challenge before all of us,” Naik said with anguish.
Equally hit are the taxi drivers numbering over a thousand all of whom are locals. The COVID-19 outbreak has totally impacted the livelihoods of drivers in this point-to-point industry.
“Ridership has plummeted and the earnings of drivers in terms of salary, overtime and tips from occasional good passenger, have dropped to nil,” they said.
Most of the taxi owners told Herald that the significant trips when they earn are the airport pickup and drop, “on a lucky day we get a drop and while coming back we get a pickup and vice versa, this is how we survive through the year,” said a taxi driver.
“If you look at the cost involved in maintenance of the taxi, replacements of tyres, drivers’ salaries, insurance, permits, passenger tax, road tax, tourism tax and bank instalments, no wise person will dare to venture into this business,” a taxi owner said.
“If the taxi meets with an accident or the tourism gets affected, then you had it. Such is the unpredictability of this taxi business. But with no other earning avenues we had taken a plunge into the business, and today we are all at cross roads,” he added.
“We read on a daily basis from newspapers that Goan industrialists are asking a financial package from the government, in fact they are big people with fat wallets, they should, at least now, make an effort to uplift their own unfortunate brethren who don’t have any other means to survive as the COVID-19 has played a cruel joke on them,” another taxi owner said.
