Team Herald
PANJIM: The Travel and Tourism Association of Goa (TTAG) has congratulated Chief Minister Pramod Sawant for remaining strong on his decision to continue the mobile-app based taxi app – GoaMiles despite stiff opposition from the traditional tourist taxi operators.
“We congratulate him on the strong and decisive leadership displayed by him on the taxi issue. Transportation solutions, which involve technology, especially app-based taxis, are a more efficient and fairer mechanism of price discovery and utilisation of assets is today the norm across most parts of the world,” TTAG president Savio Messias said in a statement issued to the media on Monday.
“Goa cannot afford to be left behind in this space as it will render us noncompetitive and the CM and his cabinet have displayed great courage in seeing that we progress on this front,” he added.
Sawant had refused to bog down to the pressure and repeated warnings by the taxi associations on continuing with GoaMiles. The black-and-yellow and black-and-yellow taxis had resorted to strike earlier this month after government declined to heed to their demand to scrap GoaMiles. Sawant had made it clear to the striking operators that the govt will not scrap GoaMiles and gave them options to either design their own mobile app or run services the way they used to earlier.
A section of tourist taxi operators then called off the strike after a few rounds of meetings with the Chief Minister.
