Goa: Pvt Tourist Taxi Driver Charges Delhi Couple Rs 5500/- For Ponda-Panaji Return Trip

PANAJI: A young couple from Delhi had to shell out Rs 5500/- for a Ponda-Panaji return trip last week – a distance of a little over 32 km; and have vowed never to return to Goa again.

The couple who were in Goa to visit family, besides the temples and religious places in the Ponda region, had some urgent, official work in the capital city of Panaji and hence requested a private cab driver to take them to the city and bring them back.

The waiting time was about two hours in Panaji, Sujeet R Naik whose grandfather was from Ponda told this reporter.

“We had some legal paperwork to be done in the capital, as my wife is a Punjabi and I am now settled in Delhi. My grandparents were from Ponda, but my father shifted to Mumbai in the early 1980s as he was working with an architectural firm at Fort, Mumbai. Later on, I moved to Delhi and now I am living in the Noida area with my wife who is a lawyer. We decided to visit our extended family in Ponda and since there was some paperwork, including attestation of legal documents, to be completed in Panaji city, we decided to take a cab. The appointment with the lawyers was fixed in advance, but it was raining heavily that day and most of the other tourist vehicles quoted us Rs 6500/- to Rs 7000/- for the return trip with a waiting time of about two hours. Finally, we managed to convince one of the drivers, who agreed for Rs 5500/-. We did get our paperwork done, but the experience has left us with a very bad taste in the mouth. We could not reschedule the appointment for another day, as our return flight tickets to Delhi were also booked in advance. Taxi operators in Goa tend to take tourists for a ride, charging them double or even triple, taking complete advantage of the fact that there is no alternative method of transport from one city to the other, except for using dingy, jam-packed private buses which ply from one city to the other,” Naik said.