The following is a guest post by Tariq Ahmad, a foreign law specialist who covers South Asian countries and Canada at the Law Library of Congress. Tariq has previously written for us on a number of issues, including the Library of Congress collection on Islamic Law in Pakistan, sedition law in India, and physician-assisted suicide in Canada. Tariq’s post today follows a similar recent piece by Jenny, Legal Challenges for Uber in the European Union and in Germany.
Just as many jurisdictions around the world are trying to keep regulatory pace with advances in mobile technology and the emergence of a “sharing economy,” state and municipal governments in India are struggling to regulate Uber and other mobile-based aggregating companies. A primary point of contention between some of these companies and government regulators is their legal status and whether they should be treated as traditional taxi-operating companies or as “intermediary” information technology companies. Aggregators like Uber contend that they do not own or lease any vehicles, employ any dri