{"id":941859,"date":"2025-06-27T09:28:45","date_gmt":"2025-06-27T03:58:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/?p=941859"},"modified":"2025-06-27T10:09:05","modified_gmt":"2025-06-27T04:39:05","slug":"a-flawed-ban-on-bike-taxis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/2025\/06\/27\/a-flawed-ban-on-bike-taxis\/","title":{"rendered":"A flawed ban on bike taxis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Shankar Nag\u2019s Auto Raja and Rajinikanth\u2019s Baashha turned the figure of the autorickshaw driver into a cultural icon \u2013 and larger than life. But between cinema and the civic reality of today, that image has changed, for worse. <\/p>\n<p>The deeper truth is political. For decades, autos have operated at the intersection of unions and political nexus, electoral arithmetic, informal finance, and street-level impunity. In cities like Bengaluru and Chennai, auto passengers are used to exorbitant flat fares, demanded without any care for regulations or policing. In this context, the emergence of bike taxis \u2013 affordable, digital, and widely preferred by commuters \u2013 has been viewed more as a threat to the old order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shankar Nag\u2019s Auto Raja and Rajinikanth\u2019s Baashha turned the figure of the autorickshaw driver into a cultural icon \u2013 and larger than life. But between cinema and the civic reality of today, that image has changed, for worse. The deeper truth is political. For decades, autos have operated at the intersection of unions and political nexus, electoral arithmetic, informal finance, and street-level impunity. In cities like Bengaluru and Chennai, auto passengers are used to exorbitant flat fares, demanded without any care for regulations or policing. In this context, the emergence of bike taxis \u2013 affordable, digital, and widely preferred by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,44,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-941859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deccan-herald-newspapers","category-it-2-deccan-herald-newspapers","category-newspapers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941859\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}