Uber has no right to operate in India: Women activists

Women activists Monday demanded a total ban on Uber cab across India, saying the company had lost the right to operate in the country as it employed a driver, who was a repeat sex offender, without any police verification.

Terming the Delhi government's ban on Uber in the city as "insufficient", women activist Tahira Hasan said the "company has no right to work in India".

Uber, the employer of a cab driver accused of raping a 25-year-old girl in Delhi, is in the thick of controversy for hiring the accused without establishing clear background checks.

In the view of this revelation, Hasan held Delhi's transport department equally responsible.

She said the department let the company operate without ensuring if the employer followed the protocol of police verification or if it had a monitoring system to track the movement of its cabs.

"The department must come out with a reasonable explanation for these oversights," she demanded.

Hitting out at the New-York based CEO Travis Kalanick for running a misleading advertising campaign, CPI-M leader Brinda Karat said: "He is an accused as far as we are concerned."

She said the company should not have advertised its service as "safe" while ignoring the police protocol of conducting a background check for prospective employees and ending up with a sex offender who had already served seven months in jail.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, the number of rapes in the country rose by 35.2 percent to 33,707 in 2013 -- with 1,441 rapes in Delhi alone, confirming its reputation as India's "rape capital".

The societal mindset that targets women as sex objects is the root of the rising rape incidents, Ranjana Kumari, director, Centre for Social Research, told IANS. In the absence of a women-friendly culture that does not treat its women with dignity, "strong law enforcement becomes an immediate requirement," she said.

After the Nirbhaya rape case in Delhi two years ago, Delhi Police had developed a protocol for employers, which was not followed by Uber.

As the lacunae continue to exist, Karat demanded an audit of the gaps between what was recommended by the Verma committee and what has been implemented so far.

Karat suggested a more efficient and women-friendly public transport system to reduce women's dependence on unsafe private taxi services like Uber.

The incident occurred when the woman hired the Uber taxi from Vasant Vihar in south Delhi to go home Friday night. She was on her way back from Gurgaon in Haryana where she works with a private company.

She told police that she fell asleep on the back seat of the taxi, before realising that it had stopped at a secluded spot and the driver was trying to molest her.

When she resisted, the driver slapped and threatened to kill her, and later raped her.

Delhi Police Sunday arrested 32-year-old accused Shiv Kumar Yadav from Mathura in Uttar Pradesh.