Gandhinagar: Union cooperation minister Amit Shah on Saturday officially launched the Bharat Taxi service in Gujarat at an event held at Mahatma Mandir. The service was launched in 14 major cities of the state, including Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Rajkot, Anand, Mehsana and Nadiad.“From today, Bharat Taxi has been officially launched in three categories: two-wheelers, auto-rickshaws, and four-wheelers” Shah said.Bharat Taxi is India’s first cooperative-led, driver-owned ride-hailing service, launched to provide a fairer alternative to traditional aggregators. Backed by the central govt and major cooperatives, it operates on a zero-commission model where drivers are platform owners and keep the full fare.Bharat Taxi also signed the memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with Gujarat Metro Rail Corporation; Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation; Gujarat State Cooperative Bank; traffic police, Surat; Rajkot and Ahmedabad airports; and the Ahmedabad division of Western Railway to expand its operations. Bharat Taxi was soft-launched in the state in Dec 2025.Speaking at the official launch, Shah alleged some private transport service companies are engaging in unfair competition by operating at a loss and slashing fares. He said reports claiming Bharat Taxi’s fares are higher were misleading.“Our objective in this competition is not to cause losses to anyone. This pattern of reducing fares and offering higher commissions to saarthis (drivers) has been adopted only to stop Bharat Taxi’s entry into the market,” he said.“Today, I received some phone calls, and some newspapers have reported that Bharat Taxi’s fares are higher. I want to tell customers across the country that wherever Bharat Taxi is entering, competing companies are slashing their fares, ready to incur losses,” the Union minister said.“They want to prevent Bharat Taxi from succeeding so that they can once again operate arbitrarily,” Shah said, adding that such “tactics” won’t work in India, where “the spirit of cooperation and the desire to work for the welfare of others are its greatest strengths”.Chief minister Bhupendra Patel, deputy CM Harsh Sanghavi, minister Jitu Vaghani, ministry of cooperation secretary Ashish Kumar Bhutani, senior functionaries from the cooperative sector, representatives of various institutions, and more than 4,000 saarthis associated with Bharat Taxi attended the event.Shah, meanwhile, noted that private companies exploited both drivers and customers for their own profit.“For their profits, these companies exploited countless saarthis as well as citizens who used taxi services. Various complaints kept pouring in… sometimes they deducted commissions from the driver’s earnings, and the fare did not reach them for several days,” Shah said. “If a customer filed a complaint, the registration of the driver would be cancelled without even hearing their side,” he added.“We thought of introducing a law to curb such exploitative practices, but a law is not always a 100% solution to a problem. It was then that we thought of introducing a taxi service on the cooperative model, which will eliminate the scope of exploitation,” Shah said.He added that the cooperative model in the dairy sector has ended exploitation, with women earning lakhs of rupees now. “India adopted the same model in the fertilisers sector as well. IFFCO and KRIBHCO cater to 35% of farmers’ fertiliser requirements,” he said.Shah said that Bharat Taxi will cover Nagpur, Pune, Mumbai, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Jaipur and Kolkata before July 31. “Within two years, covering both large and small places, we are going to launch our two-wheeler, auto-rickshaw and four-wheeler concept in 500 cities and towns,” he added.
