No tourists to ferry, taxi driver switches to manual labour

Amit Khajuria

Tribune News Service

Jammu, June 14

Before the lockdown, taxi driver Kuldeep Kumar would wear his neat uniform and get ready every day to ferry tourists in his vehicle. His livelihood has been hit hard and his life has turned upside down in the last three months.

Kuldeep Kumar now works as a labourer and unloads vegetables from trucks at a vegetable market to feed his family. He has to pay the monthly instalment of Rs 10,000 for the bank loan taken for his car, but has not been able to do so in the past three months given his financial condition. “I have to bear the expenses of the taxi, including loan instalments, road tax, insurance, maintenance and parking fees. For the past three months, my financial condition has gone from bad to worse,” said Kumar, who lives with his wife and a daughter at his ancestral house at Resham Ghar Colony.

“I have exhausted whatever little savings I had. At 4 am, I go to the vegetable market at Narwal every day and work there as labourer for six to sevenhours. I earn only Rs 300 a day,” he said.

“If I would have waited for the situation to get normal, I would have been forced to sell my vehicle and my daughter would have had to discontinue her schooling,” he said.

The lockdown has badly hit the transport sector in Jammu and Kashmir, particularly the taxis. More than 45,000 taxis are totally dependent on tourism and pilgrimage in the UT.