Australian cabbies find the driving tough

Syrus Razzaghipour is a doctor. He drives taxis for a living.

What? What was that again?

Yes, you heard it right. Kurdish refugee Syrus Razzaghipour is a medical graduate. And for a living he drives taxis.

Nothing strange really. For we are discussing Sydney here, which boasts of the most educated taxi drivers in the world. There are thousands like our Kurdish refugee Syrus -- most are immigrants from the Third World who end up as cabbies, as Australia refuses to recognise degrees from such countries.

In Syrus's case too, that was what had happened. The government refused to register him as a doctor. He spent a couple of months trying to persuade the authorities otherwise, but to no avail. So on he donned the cabbie's cap.

''It didn't make much difference what I was doing, since I was not to practice medicine, " he says, ''The money is good, so I took it up."

But that was four years ago. Times have changed now and though Syrus owns a florist's shop in Sydney today, there are hundreds who finds the going pretty tough.

The competition is fierce -- Sydney alone has over 20,000 cabbies -- and drivers have reported an escalation in verbal and physical attacks, forcing the state government to recognise taxi driving as a hazardous industry. Surveys indicate that every year, over 2,200 drivers are assaulted and another 1,600 robbed. Five have been killed since 1993.

Now, the government plans to introduce a reform package for the industry. As safety measures, the authorities will introduce satellite-based global positioning systems and driver protection screens by June. These would allow the police to pinpoint locations of drivers in distress immediately.

Joe Xie is an engineering graduate from China who had put in several years with a Chinese firm in his hometown. But now that the engineer has emigrated to Australia, he finds himself driving taxis.

''What can you do when two or three clients just sit behind and start abusing you?" Joe asks, ''Anglo Australians don't know much about other cultures or nations; that's why they behave like this," he says.

For any other job than a cabbie's, he says, you got to have experience in the country. And that is the problem: Migrants cannot get a job since they don't have experience in Australia, and they cannot get experience because they do not get jobs.

Thus, most taxi drivers, however well qualified they are, once they take up the job, finds themselves trapped in it.

And now they have to put with the racism too.