With 9211cabs, the exclusive application for black and yellow taxi drivers scheduled to go live in Western suburbs from Bandra to Borivali on Monday, the biggest challenge faced by the taxi drivers is lack of technological know-how.
Around 250 of the drivers turned up for training to use the application at Mahim on Sunday.
Malay Kothari of CWD technology, who has been given the contract by the two cabbies unions funding the application — Mumbai Taximens Union and Mumbai Taxi Association — said that cabbies have been give the most basic application with only seven to eight steps.
“Since the taxi drivers are not very tech-savvy, we have provided the basic seven to eight steps initially which include the essential features like options to reject a fare, call the passenger, start the metre etc,” he said.
Mr Kothari, who was one of the people who trained the cabbies, said that CWD would slowly introduce more features into the app over time, as the taxi drivers familiarise themselves with it.
“As the cabbies familiarise themselves with application overt time we will add two features every 15 days,” added Mr Kothari.
Although the unions have a combined strength of 38,000 taxis in the island city and extended suburbs, only 700 have registered and submitted their documents to register for the application.
When asked why the experiment has been limited to Bandra to Borivali and not South Mumbai union leader A.L. Quadros said this is a soft launch of the application to test the waters.
“We can’t go all out and launch it throughout the city as we have a lot of constraints,” he said.
“We do not know if it will take off and to launch it we need to be sure that we will get the passengers, because it would entail even more investment,” he added.
The black and yellow cabs, although small in number had been made available in other applications by private taxi operators, but this will be the first time that an exclusive application for black and yellow taxi drivers will be launched.
