Uber has come under severe pressure in Sri Lanka folowing an incident in which a passenger was assaulted by an Uber driver.

The passenger later posted on social media that although he lodged a police complaint about the incident, there was no support from the Uber customer care service for the investigation process.

Uber does not operate an active customer support service in Sri Lanka, despite the global taxi-hailing company being present in the market for nearly 4 years. Some prominent activists and thoughtleaders have called for the suspension of Uber in Sri Lanka until the company sets up a proper customer support system in the country.

The incident, as narrated by the passenger in his social media post, is as follows,

"The incident happened on Nov. 24, when I left a friend’s place in Hokandara around 10 pm . I was waiting for a tuk I booked via UBER and the driver called me and said he was at a different location despite me entering the exact location on the UBER app.

I received a notification that the driver had cancelled my booking. While wondering what happened, I ordered another three-wheeler on the UBER app, where a driver picked up my booking and the app indicated that he was on his way. In about two minutes the driver arrived and I got in. While we were on our way, I got a notification that I had been charged Rs.50 on my earlier booking and it appeared that it was the same driver that I was travelling with now. Then I politely inquired about this from him, since I was not the one who cancelled the request!

Totally unexpectedly the driver started being violent and abusive over the inquiry I made regarding the cancellation charged from me. Then politely I asked him to stop the tuk so I can get off, coz I didn't want to travel with him. The driver scolded me in filth, stopped the tuk and grabbed me by my shirt collar, and smashed my head on the steel bar that separated the driver from the passenger seating area. I remember feeling dizzy & falling. Then I woke up at the Sri Jayawardenapura Hospital. To my luck ,a kind person had discovered me lying on the road bleeding and had called an ambulance. I was kept under observation in the Neurology ICU . The doctors have diagnosed it as a head injury.

I was discharged from the hospital on the 29th Nov, but still experiencing flow of brain fluid through my ear & nose due to the hairline fracture in my brain, which the doctors informed would take a couple of weeks to heal but at a very high risk of infection reaching the brain. My wife had lodged a complaint at the Thalangama Police regarding the incident with information we have of the uber driver. I’ve uploaded the same here coz if you are an UBER user, you can avoid this maniac.

My family had tried to contact the UBER office & to our surprise, there is no customer care number for the UBER office in Sri Lanka. The numbers on Uber website is only for driver assistance.

With the greatest of difficulty my family had managed to contact a personal number of an employee of UBER Sri Lanka and had informed him of the incident. Thereafter we were contacted by an UBER representative from India . We clearly requested them to get in touch with the police asap & coporate with them as the police informed us that they were unable to get through to UBER.

To my amazement the Thalangama police requested us for contact details of UBER.

So if there is no customer care representative or customer care line in Sri Lanka..., how are they even allowed to operate in Sri Lanka??? We have been traumatized by this episode and have decided to take the case forward as far as we can, as things like this shouldn't happen in this country. I’m sharing this horrific experience on social media, to make people aware of the consequences of using the services of UBER in Sri Lanka."