Honouring, safeguarding, and nurturing a native language in an international, multi-lingual city is always a challenge. The continuing fracas over making Marathi compulsory for autorickshaw and taxi drivers in Mumbai reflects this.
The Maharashtra government’s gazette of June 12, 2026, which made the practical working knowledge of Marathi necessary for drivers of autorickshaws, taxis, and app-based cabs, was brought into effect earlier this month.
Most of them see this as an imposition. To protest the move, drivers have resorted to a strike at sporadic points across Mumbai, causing major disruptions to the regular rhythm of the city’s transport network and inconveniences to lakhs of people, including children who depend on them for school runs.
Implementation Challenges
The government’s intent, in itself, is not misplaced, given the anxiety over the sustenance of Marathi in Mumbai, but there is cause for much grievance over the ham-handedness, short-sightedness, and selectivity with which it has gone about the task.
Its platforms to enable drivers to learn spoken or colloquial Marathi are few and far between; the accessible ones take the more formal literary approach, and the time is too short to enforce the decision.
Simply put, the government apparatus to implement its decision is found wanting. Then why insist on the short timeframe of a few months, putting stress on drivers, irrespective of the length of their stay in the city? They are, but naturally, agitated.
Caught between the government and drivers are lakhs of Mumbaikars who have been stranded, forced to pay more, or suffer inordinate delays in their daily commutes. Commuters are being held to ransom by both the parties involved; this is unpardonable.
Here, the issue of selectivity becomes relevant. If semi-public transport drivers must learn Marathi because of their daily interface with people, then the rule should extend to other service providers, such as streetside vendors, shop owners and staff, delivery executives, and so on.
Singling out drivers makes little sense. In a city made of and by migrants, only the exclusive or exceptionally wealthy, such as actors Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan or the Ambanis, can get away without speaking a word of Marathi.
Preserving Marathi In Mumbai
The anxiety over Marathi being erased from Mumbai is real given the gradual erosion of the language and culture from the city’s geography—Dadar, Parel, and Girgaon are less Maharashtrian than a decade ago—and is rooted in the historical agitation to ensure that the city remained the capital of Maharashtra during the state’s reorganisation after Independence.
Marathi must be widely spoken and nurtured in Mumbai, but the burden of that must not fall on a selective set of the more vulnerable Mumbaikars, such as auto and taxi drivers—and certainly not at the cost of the inconvenience of the majority of Mumbaikars. This is not the ‘idea of Mumbai’.
