A temporary reprieve

With the government agreeing to consider some of the demands of the All India Motor Transport Congress, the truckers strike has ended. The g...

With the government agreeing to consider some of the demands of the All India Motor Transport Congress, the truckers strike has ended. The government has conditionally agreed to set up a committee on toll tax and Petroleum Minister Ram Naik has agreed to take steps to facilitate a fall in diesel prices. The demand of the transport truck owners that toll charges must not be collected and diesel price must be reduced was utterly unreasonable and the fact that the government has met these demands halfway shows that there was an enormous amount of pressure on the administration to act in order to prevent massive shortages and public trauma. If there is one legitimate demand the truckers may have had, it had to do with harassment on the highways by excise and police authorities. But the welfare of truck drivers hardly figured in the negotiations between the AIMTC and the government. Instead it was the truck owners who kept harping on diesel pricing and toll taxes, neither of which can be regarded as legitimate.The truck oweners had no right to blackmail the country and the government in the manner that they seem to have succeeded in doing.

The divisions within the agitators, between transport companies and individual truckers, brings out the fact that this strike was not just about transparency in diesel pricing and fairness in highway regulation but also about tax avoidance and tax evasion. Just as Delhi8217;s traders opposed VAT because it would expose their tax evasion, the truckers were also more worried about the greater transparency in taxation that VAT will bring in. The entire agitation was, therefore, based on spurious demands of dubious merit which carried disastrous implications for consumers, producers and the economy as a whole.

The truckers agitation contains portents for the future. Tomorrow owners of oil refineries or doctors could stamp on the lifeline of essential services simply because they want to evade taxes or want lower costs for their raw materials. It is these sorts of agitations that force the government to resort to draconian laws. In fact the government would have been better advised to bring truck transportation under the purview of the Essential Services Maintenance Act ESMA and tide over the immediate crisis by using public transport including requisitioning army trucks. Such a step would have sent the strong signal that the government would not be held hostage over essential services. As it is, the government has created a face saving device for itself and the truckers and earned a temporary reprieve.