Around a dozen autorickshaw and taxi unions in Ahmedabad have called a strike from 7 to 10 September, grouping themselves under a banner they are calling the Rozgar Bachao Andolan. The list of signatories reported by DeshGujarat runs across most of the city’s driver bodies, from the Ahmedabad Rickshaw Chalak Ekta Union and the All Gujarat Autorickshaw Drivers Union to the Ahmedabad Railway Station Auto Drivers Union and the Ahmedabad Taxi Drivers Union. TV9 Gujarati reports the organisers expect about two lakh vehicles to stay off the road. That number comes from the unions rather than from the RTO, and past strikes in the city have fallen well short of the turnout their organisers promised.
What the drivers are asking for
Two demands sit at the centre. The first is enforcement against private two-wheelers, the ones on white number plates, carrying paying passengers through apps such as Rapido and Uber. Drivers say a state circular on this already exists and that nobody is acting on it. The second is money: union representatives told TV9 Gujarati that aggregator payouts have not moved even as fuel prices have, and that the city still has no fixed fare schedule for taxis. Meters are a related sore point, since a large share of the fleet runs without one.
Read together, the demands describe a squeeze rather than a single grievance. A rickshaw driver competing with a bike taxi loses the short trip, which is the trip that pays for a working day in a city as spread out as Ahmedabad. A driver on an aggregator platform then absorbs commission and fuel on whatever is left.
This fight has a history
Ahmedabad’s transport office has intervened before. In January 2025 the RTO suspended Rapido’s bike taxi operations for 30 days and gave Uber 15 days to stop using motorcycles, holding that non-transport two-wheelers were being used commercially without yellow plates, the right registration or the right insurance, as LatestLY reported at the time. The services came back. That is the pattern the unions are protesting against: enforcement that arrives, holds for a few weeks and lapses.
Strikes have followed a pattern of their own. A July 2024 stoppage drew a thin response and was called off once officials gave an assurance. Union leaders now say that if the September strike changes nothing, they will push for a state-wide protest.
What it means if you live in Ahmedabad
The dates cover Monday to Thursday, a full working block with no holiday cushion. Anyone whose commute depends on a rickshaw for the first or last two kilometres should plan for four mornings of scarcity. Metro’s Blue and Red lines, the BRTS trunk routes and AMTS buses will absorb some of it along the corridors they serve. They do not reach much of eastern Ahmedabad or the newer western fringes, and that is where the gap will show, along with school runs and hospital visits that cannot wait.
Expect the cabs and bikes that do run to charge more. Surge pricing on a strike day is the market working as designed, and it is also the argument the striking drivers are making about who captures the fare.
What to watch
The first signal is whether the state transport department or the Ahmedabad RTO says anything before Monday. An assurance on enforcement against white-plate bike taxis has ended strikes here before, and a repeat would tell you the dispute is being managed rather than settled. The second is turnout, which will show whether the driver bodies still hold the city’s fleet together or whether app-based earnings have pulled enough drivers away from the union structure to make a call like this symbolic.
Beyond both sits the question nobody in Gujarat has answered yet: whether bike taxis get a legal category of their own with plates, insurance and a fare floor, or stay in the grey zone where each RTO decides for itself how hard to look.
Sources: DeshGujarat, TV9 Gujarati, LatestLY
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.