Ahmedabad, June 28 -- Union home minister and cooperation minister Amit Shah said on Saturday that Bharat Taxi will expand to over 500 cities including Nagpur, Pune, Mumbai, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Jaipur and Kolkata, within the next two years, even as he accused private app-based cab aggregators of temporarily slashing fares and offering higher commissions to drivers to prevent the growth of the cooperative ride-hailing platform, saying the strategy would fail. Speaking at the launch of Bharat Taxi's Gujarat operations at Mahatma Mandir in Gandhinagar, Shah said competing companies were willing to incur losses for a limited period to stop the cooperative platform from gaining ground. "Wherever Bharat Taxi is reaching, competing companies are temporarily reducing fares by incurring losses. This can continue only for one or two years. The companies reducing fares and temporarily offering higher commissions to Sarathis are doing so only to stop Bharat Taxi's progress," Shah said. Bharat Taxi is India's first cooperative-led, driver-owned ride-hailing service, launched to provide a fairer alternative to traditional aggregators. Backed by the Central government and major cooperatives, it operates on a zero-commission model where drivers are platform owners and keep the full fare. The service was launched in 14 Gujarat cities, including Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara and Rajkot. He also said more than seven lakh drivers, called "Sarathis", have joined the platform by purchasing Rs.100 shares and that it has served over 3.7 million customers. The home minister alleged that the companies wanted Bharat Taxi to exit the market so they could later return to "arbitrary practices"....