Driver Conduct & Duty Hours

Why we publish this

A meaningful share of outstation road accidents in India are fatigue accidents, a driver behind the wheel for longer than is safe. We publish this page because that is a fact about the road, not a hypothetical, and because the answer to it is entirely within our control. What follows is a safety commitment, not a limitation on your trip: where a plan genuinely needs more driving than one man can safely manage in a day, our answer is a second driver, never a tired one.

Most operators in this trade do not put any of this in writing. A driver is briefed verbally, if at all, and a customer has no way of knowing what standard he is being held to until something goes wrong on the road. We think that is the wrong way round. A family booking a car for a wedding, a company sending an executive to catch a flight, or a group heading to the hills for a long weekend is entitled to know, before the booking is confirmed, exactly what we expect of the man behind the wheel and what happens if he falls short of it.

This page sets that standard down in one place: how a driver on our panel is expected to conduct himself, what the law says about duty hours and rest, our position on alcohol and prohibited substances, and the route open to you if a driver’s conduct falls short of it on your trip. It applies equally to a vehicle from our own fleet and to one from a partner operator running under our booking, because the person sitting behind you has no way of knowing, and no reason to care, which of the two owns the vehicle. Nothing on this page is written as a brochure line. Each clause is something we can be held to, and several of them are also something the law already holds us to whether we publish it or not.

Conduct standards

Every driver on our panel is expected to keep to the following, on every duty, without exception. These are not aspirations we hope a driver lives up to on a good day; they are the baseline every duty is measured against, and a driver who cannot hold to them does not stay on our panel.

• Courteous, professional conduct with you and everyone travelling with you, from pick-up to drop.
• No soliciting a tip, gift or payment beyond the fare on your invoice.
• No passenger in the vehicle outside your booking, without your knowledge and your consent.
• No deviation from the agreed route without telling you first and getting your consent.
• No personal phone call while the vehicle is moving.

Each of these is stated plainly on purpose, but a plain sentence can hide what it actually means on the road. Here is what each one covers in practice.

Courteous, professional conduct

This covers how a driver speaks with you, how he handles your luggage, and how he treats everyone travelling with you, including children, elderly parents and household staff, not only the person who made the booking. A driver who is short with a domestic help riding along, or dismissive with an elderly parent seated behind him, has failed this standard as surely as one who is rude to you directly.

No soliciting a tip, gift or payment beyond the fare

The fare on your invoice is the whole of what the trip costs you. A driver asking for money on the side, however politely, for fuel he says fell short, a toll he says he paid from his own pocket, or simply as a gesture at the end of a long day, is asking for something outside that agreement, and it is not permitted. Where a genuine pass-through cost such as a toll or a parking charge genuinely needs settling, it is accounted for on the quotation or the invoice, never negotiated at the roadside.

No passenger outside your booking

The vehicle carries who you booked it for and nobody else, unless you have said otherwise. A driver picking up a relative on the way, or letting a friend ride along on the return leg, changes who is travelling in your vehicle without your knowledge, and that is a trust question and, depending on the insurance cover in force, a genuine liability question too.

No deviation from the agreed route

The itinerary you booked is the itinerary the driver runs, subject only to a genuine reason such as heavy traffic, a closed road or a diversion ordered by the police, and even then he tells you first wherever it is practical. A driver taking a shortcut through an unfamiliar area, or stopping at a shop or a dhaba of his own choosing rather than one you have agreed on, without asking, has deviated without your consent.

No personal phone call while the vehicle is moving

A phone call is one of the more common and one of the more avoidable causes of driver distraction on the road. This applies whether the vehicle is on the highway or crawling through city traffic; a moving vehicle is a moving vehicle either way. A driver who needs to take an urgent call is expected to pull over safely first, not to hold the phone to his ear while the car is still rolling.

A driver who breaks any of the above is spoken to and, depending on how serious the lapse is and whether it recurs, may lose his place on our panel. How to raise a concern about any of it is set out further down this page.

Alcohol and substances: zero tolerance

Driving under the influence of alcohol or a prohibited substance is an offence under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, and separately from what the law already requires, it is something we will not have on our panel under any circumstance. This is not a policy that permits a small quantity on the reasoning that it will go unnoticed, and it does not treat a driver differently depending on whether he is on a short local run or a three-day outstation trip. It applies to every driver who takes a vehicle out for us, whether he is on our own panel or with a partner operator, and it is not negotiable.

We do not operate a permitted limit of our own. The law sets a blood alcohol threshold for the purpose of prosecution, but a threshold is not the same thing as a safe amount, and impairment does not wait for a number on a breathalyser before it begins. Reaction time, judgement and the ability to read the road ahead all start to suffer well before a driver would cross any legal limit, and a chauffeur carrying a family, a wedding party or a company’s executive is not a place we are willing to leave that margin to chance. Zero means zero: not on duty, not in the hours before a duty that starts early, and not during a break in the middle of one.

Zero tolerance on alcohol and substances. Any driver found to have consumed alcohol or a prohibited substance while on duty is removed from duty immediately and permanently from our panel, and the matter is reported to the police where required.

A driver removed under this policy does not return to our panel at a later date, on this booking or on any future one; there is no probation period and no second chance built into it. Where the law requires the matter to go to the police, and it generally does, it goes to the police. If you or anyone travelling with you has any reason to suspect a driver has been drinking or is under the influence of anything else, tell us immediately using the contact details later on this page, even mid-trip if that is when it happens, and we will act on it the same day.

Duty hours and rest

A driver’s working hours are not left to informal judgement. The Motor Transport Workers Act, 1961 regulates a motor transport worker’s hours of work, and Section 183(2) of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 makes it an offence for an employer to require or allow a driver to drive beyond permitted hours. This is what we commit to.

Fatigue behaves differently from most of the other risks a driver meets on the road. A hazard such as heavy traffic or bad weather is visible, and a driver adjusts to it as he meets it. Fatigue builds quietly, over hours rather than minutes, and the driver experiencing it is usually the last person in a position to judge how far along it has gone. On an outstation run this risk does not merely continue, it compounds: a highway stretch that runs straight for an hour at a time is monotonous in a way city driving is not, an early start followed by a full day on the road followed by a late arrival leaves very little natural break in the day, and a driver who set out at four in the morning to beat the traffic out of Delhi is often still on the road well into the evening. None of that is unusual for this trade. It is exactly the pattern a long outstation booking tends to produce, and it is exactly where an informal operator is most tempted to simply keep going because the customer wants to reach that night.

The effect of this kind of fatigue on driving is well established: a slower reaction time, a narrower field of attention, and in the worst case a microsleep of a second or two at highway speed, which is long enough on its own for a vehicle to drift out of its lane. None of this announces itself to the driver in advance the way hunger or thirst does, which is precisely why we do not leave the decision to push on to informal judgement made at ten at night on an unfamiliar road, hours from home and hours from the destination. It is a decision our booking process is built to work through before the vehicle ever leaves, not one we ask a tired driver to make for himself somewhere past midnight.

We will decline or re-price an itinerary that cannot be operated within safe duty limits. If your plan requires more driving in a day than one driver can safely do, we will tell you at quotation stage and offer a second driver or a revised itinerary. We will not agree to an unsafe schedule in order to win a booking.

This is why an itinerary is checked at the quotation stage, before anything is confirmed, rather than left to be worked out on the day by whoever happens to be driving. It is also why the two options set out in the next two sections, a second driver or a revised schedule, are built into how we plan a trip as a matter of course, and not offered only when something has already gone wrong.

The two-driver option

For a longer day on the road, an overnight run or a multi-day outstation trip, we can arrange a second driver so the vehicle is never driven by one man beyond what is safe for him. Tell us this at the time of booking and we will quote it as part of your itinerary. Where we judge at quotation stage that your plan needs a second driver, we will say so and offer one, rather than sending a single driver on a schedule that is not safe.

This tends to come up in a handful of recognisable situations: a single day covering a genuinely long distance with a same-day return, an overnight drive where the vehicle is expected to keep moving through the hours most people are asleep, a multi-day outstation trip where the same vehicle is in near-continuous use across the whole itinerary, and a wedding booking where the car is on call across a long day that starts well before the baraat and finishes well after the reception. None of these is unusual on its own. What turns any of them into a two-driver conversation is the combination of distance, timing and how many consecutive days the same vehicle is expected to be available for.

In practice the two drivers alternate: one drives while the other rests, either at a scheduled halt or, on a long stretch, in the vehicle itself, and they change over at a natural break point such as a meal stop or an overnight halt rather than mid-drive. You deal with one point of contact throughout, our office, and the handover between the two drivers is arranged so that it does not interrupt your own schedule or require you to manage it. If your plan changes after booking and starts to look like it needs a second driver where it did not before, tell us and we will revisit it. Equally, if we did not flag it at quotation stage and you feel, once the trip is under way, that a duty is asking too much of one man, say so and we will look at it again rather than waiting for the itinerary to run its course.

Fatigue self-reporting

A driver on our panel may tell us, at any point in a duty, that he is fatigued and needs to stop. He will not be penalised for saying so. Where a driver reports fatigue, we arrange a rest break, a change of driver, or a revised schedule, rather than asking him to carry on.

This matters because the pressure not to report fatigue is real, and it comes from more than one direction. A driver worried about being seen as unreliable, about losing a future booking, or simply about disappointing a customer who is keen to reach on time, has an obvious incentive to say nothing and push through. That is precisely the wrong incentive to place on anyone entrusted with a vehicle full of people, and it is the incentive we are deliberately working against. A driver who reports fatigue early, before it becomes a genuine hazard rather than after, has done exactly what we want him to do, and treating that report as a mark against him would only teach every driver on our panel to stop reporting it at all.

In practice this means a report of fatigue is not questioned or argued with at the roadside. It is acted on. If a short halt at the next safe stop is enough, that is what happens. If it is not, we arrange a change of driver where a second driver is already on the booking, or we revise the remaining schedule and tell you plainly what has changed and why. None of this is held against the driver on his record with us, and none of it is treated as a failure on your booking. It is the system doing precisely what it is meant to do.

Your role as our customer

The same commitment runs the other way, and it depends on your cooperation as much as it depends on ours. A driver’s decision to stop and rest, or to say plainly that a schedule is asking too much of him, is far easier to make and to act on when the customer in the vehicle is not pushing against it. This is what we ask of you.

Please do not pressure a driver to skip a break or drive beyond his hours. If you need a longer day, tell us at booking and we will assign a second driver. Section 183(2) of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 makes it an offence for an employer to require a driver to drive beyond permitted hours, and we take that seriously.

We understand the instinct on the other side of this. A flight to catch the next morning, a wedding muhurat that will not wait, a long weekend with only so many hours in it: there are genuine reasons a customer wants to keep moving, and we are not asking you to give any of that up. What we are asking is that the decision about whether it is safe to keep driving stays with us and with the driver, and not with the schedule alone. If a plan is tight, tell us when you book, and we will build the second driver or the necessary rest stops into it from the start, so that you are never choosing between reaching on time and reaching safely somewhere on the road at midnight. That choice should not have to be made inside the vehicle, and building it into the plan in advance is how we avoid it having to be made at all.

Monitoring

Where a vehicle is fitted with GPS or telematics, the record it keeps, location, speed and halts, supports our review of how a duty was actually driven, and lets us follow up on a reported concern with more than one person’s account to go on. A concern raised after the fact usually comes down to one person’s word, the customer’s, against another’s, the driver’s, and a route and speed record gives us something independent of both to check a report against before we decide what to do about it.

This is a supplement to how we manage a duty, not a substitute for it. A driver’s own reporting, a customer’s feedback and the standard set out on this page remain the primary way we hold every duty to account; where fitted, a vehicle’s tracking record simply makes that review more exact when it is needed, and it is most useful precisely on a long outstation run, where nobody from our office is present to see how the day actually went.

Training

Every driver on our panel goes through induction before he starts taking out a vehicle for us, and refresher training after that, covering defensive driving and courteous conduct with a passenger. Training is not a one-time formality; it continues for as long as a driver is on our panel.

The reasoning behind this is straightforward. A driver can hold a valid licence and still not drive the way we expect a driver representing us to drive: defensively, at a pace that respects the passengers in the vehicle rather than the driver’s own schedule, and courteously with people who are, for the length of the trip, guests in what is effectively his workplace. Induction is where we set that expectation before a driver ever takes a vehicle out on our behalf, and it is not treated as delivered once and then forgotten. A standard stated only once, at the start, tends to fade the way any instruction fades when nobody returns to it.

What this covers, in substance, is defensive driving, being the driver who anticipates the mistake of the vehicle or the pedestrian ahead rather than merely reacting to it after the fact, and the conduct standards set out earlier on this page: courtesy, no unauthorised deviation, no personal calls while the vehicle is moving, and the rest of what a duty is measured against. A driver who has been on our panel for years is not assumed to remember all of this by habit alone. The training that started at induction is revisited for as long as he continues to drive for us, and it is one of the things we look at again if a genuine concern is ever raised against him.

How to report a driver

This page sets a standard. What matters just as much is what happens when a driver does not meet it, and that is what this section is for.

If a driver’s conduct falls short of what is set out on this page, tell us. Write to us, call us, or use WhatsApp; every channel reaches the same desk, sachin@om-travels.in or +91 99966 69190, and the full escalation ladder, with named officers and our response timelines, is at /grievance-redressal.

• We investigate every report, and speak to the driver concerned as part of that; a report is never set aside without being looked into.
• Raising a genuine concern does not count against you, now or on a future booking, and plays no part in how we treat your next enquiry.
• We tell you the outcome once we have looked into it, in plain terms, not merely that the matter is closed.

Reporting a driver is not the same as raising a complaint you then have to manage yourself. Once you have told us, it is our process from there: we speak to the driver, check whatever record exists for that duty, including a tracking record where the vehicle carries one, and decide what follows, whether that is a conversation, a formal warning, removal from a particular kind of duty, or removal from our panel altogether under the zero-tolerance policy set out above, where the conduct concerned is drink, substances, or anything else that policy covers. None of this requires you to confront the driver yourself or to follow up more than once. We come back to you with what we found and what we did about it, and a genuine report is treated as something that helps us keep this standard, never as an inconvenience.