SONYA FATAH

Those who pull the carriages are fighting the state’s push to get rid of the vehicles

The Globe and Mail, Monday, January 22, 2007

SONYA FATAH

CALCUTTA — In the narrow, winding streets of old Calcutta, Mohammad Hakeem is one of the thousands of rickshaw pullers who ferry passengers back and forth on a two-seater carriage on wheels. He works from morning to night and the soles of his bare feet are hard and cracked.

But he doesn’t think life’s been hard on him. “The English started this tradition when they were here,” he says, happily offering a history lesson. “Our fathers did this before us, and it’s just that the tradition is carrying on.”

It may not carry on for much longer. The rickshaw, which at the turn of the last century formed the backbone of transport in many Indian cities, is now fighting for its existence in Calcutta.

In early December, the West Bengal State Assembly called the work inhumane and outlawed rickshaws.

Concern about inhumanity, however, may obscure a more pressing governmental preoccupation: presenting a modern Indian face to the world. West Bengal’s politicians have been trying to attract foreign investment to the state. Many believe that rickshaw pullers reflect negatively on the city’s image.

Rickshaw pullers are fighting back. The Calcutta Hand Rickshaw Pullers Union recently asked West Bengali Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to draft a retraining package. They were told that licensed rickshaw pullers would be appropriately taken care of. Although there were about 6,000 licensed rickshaws in Calcutta several years ago, thousands more ply the city’s streets unlicensed. Their ability to operate comes from the area’s many police officers who give them free passage in exchange for monthly bribes.

The city’s hand-pulled rickshaw trade is almost entirely done by rural migrant workers from one of India’s most troubled and impoverished states, Bihar. They come to the city for work, leaving behind families with promises of monthly earnings.

Mr. Hakeem is one of them. Thirty years ago, as a young man, he came to Calcutta with a head full of dreams and began searching for work. He found that other Biharis like himself, migrant workers from the countryside, were pulling rickshaws. It was a good place to start, it seemed.

But three decades later, Mr. Hakeem has the same job, still rents his rickshaw and makes about the same earnings. The vehicles are rented at 20 rupees (about 50 cents) for a 12-hour shift, and rickshaw pullers earn about 100 rupees (about $2.65) a day.

“We feed our families on our income,” says Shaikh Hameed, who has been peddling his rickshaw on the streets for 15 years. Many of Mr. Hameed’s colleagues are skeptical of government promises to find them new work. Their current job, they say, might be “donkey work,” but it isn’t “undignified” or unethical. It’s simply a job. Without it, they fear going hungry.

This is not the first time the government has tried to ban hand-pulled rickshaws. Similar measures were taken more than two decades ago.

“The left-run government [of the day] began to intervene in the city in a big way,” says Joi Sen, a social activist who in 1977 founded the Unnayan agency, which works with the poor. “There were mass evictions of people, seizures of rickshaws. But it was inspired by the desire to beautify the city, clean it up to pave the way for external capital.”

Among Unnayan’s major projects was research into Calcutta’s rickshaw pullers and their livelihoods. When the government moved to confiscate unlicensed rickshaws, Mr. Sen, says, it worked selectively, banning those that were not allied to the then-ruling party.

Mr. Sen, too, believes that hand-pulled rickshaws ought to be a thing of the past. His organization had argued for an alternative mode of transportation. Unnayan activists brought in engineers to redesign the rickshaw and offer a more ergonomic pedal version. Nothing came of that plan, partly because resistance came from the pullers themselves.

“We don’t want to ride cycle rickshaws,” says Mohammad Sirajuddin.

“We can pull because we use our arms but we don’t know how to use our legs in the same way.”

For Calcutta’s rickshaw pullers, who have little or no education, this is a way of life.

“We have to do what we do,” says Gopal Prasad Yadav, a rickshaw puller from Bihar who has five children, “otherwise we won’t have anything to eat.”

Popularity: 2% [?]

A HOMECOMING DENIED

Wahidullah plays a game of karam at the UNHCR sponsored English language training centre

The Globe and Mail, January 13, 2007
SONYA FATAH

NEW DELHI — Wahidullah and Rahila Malikzad live with their two young children in a shabby room in south Delhi. They are thousands of kilometres from home, but they are safe. In their native Afghanistan, the enmity between their families would have left them dead long ago.

They met more than five years ago, when their families lived in the same apartment block in Kabul. But their union was forbidden: Wahid was of the Tajik tribe and Shia; Rahila was Pashtun and Sunni.

Her family supported the Taliban and her eldest brother was an enlisted foot soldier. When her parents learned about her romance with Wahid, they beat her.

The couple fled overland to Pakistan, where an imam in a local mosque married them. For two years, they were settled in Hayatabad, close to the frontier city of Peshawar. Wahid continued to work in the carpet business and soon accumulated some wealth.

But after their first child, Farhad, was born, the couple yearned to return home. They hoped their success and their newborn child, a son no less, would warm their parents’ hearts. So, with little Farhad in tow, the two returned to Afghanistan.

Now, they acknowledge their naiveté. “It was my fault,” said a soft-spoken Wahid, resting on his haunches in one corner of the room. “I saw her youngest brother in the market place and told him where we lived. Rahila’s brothers sent hit men to hunt me down.”

With less than 20,000 rupees (about $500 Canadian), they fled once more, this time to India, a country that has warmly welcomed a steady stream of Afghan refugees since the Taliban came to power in the mid-1990s.

India has no defined refugee laws and treats refugees under Article 21 of its own Constitution, which confers upon all individuals the right to life. That means Wahid and Rahila can stay on the assumption that their lives are in danger, but like other refugees in India, they don’t have the right to work in the formal sector.

For Wahid and Rahila that is a minor worry. They are still waiting for the UN to approve their refugee status. Meanwhile they survive on the pittance that Rahila earns for cooking food and washing clothes for an elderly neighbour.

“We are happy here in India,” a liberated Rahila said in her family’s sparsely furnished New Delhi room. A single bed stands in one corner and a ruby red carpet is spread across the stone floor. A TV, a gift from a well wisher, is the only sign of wealth.

“We are not in touch with my family or my husband’s family. Our lives were in danger in Afghanistan. We left everything behind but we are safe here.”

Popularity: 3% [?]

LETTER FROM NOIDA: ENVIRONMENT

Entrepreneur wastes no time capitalizing on India ’s seemingly endless consumption

The Globe and Mail
Friday, January 5, 2007
SONYA FATAH

The sight of a suited businessman sifting through garbage isn’t common in India . But if you find yourselves on the outskirts of Noida, just east of the India ’s capital New Delhi , and spy a suit amid the garbage, you’ve probably found Manik Thapar, an Indo-Canadian entrepreneur who is setting aside conventional caste wisdom and getting his hands dirty.
Mr. Thapar joins a growing number of Indo-Canadians and Indo-Americans who are returning to India and investing in new businesses in anticipation of a growing consumer market. He sensed huge potential in the waste collection and management business, and while building his fortune figured he would also be doing a social service.
Garbage collection is hardly the most envied of businesses in India , where a caste hierarchy mandates that rubbish collection is not the domain of the educated and wealthy. Mr. Thapar didn’t care. India , which recycles more than 90 per cent of its waste, offered huge opportunities in waste management. Last April, he launched Eco Wise Waste Management Pvt. Ltd., providing a four-stage process of collection, transportation, treatment and disposal of waste material.
“I was doing my MBA in Michigan when I did a study on waste management and discovered the business potential for Eco Wise,” says Mr. Thapar as he inspects composting material on the two-acre property he has leased from a farmer.
He hoped to capitalize on India ’s seemingly endless consumption and waste production capacity and the lack of appropriate waste disposal systems. In Noida alone, 350 tons of waste are generated daily. Much of it was left along empty sites, a treasure hunt destination for the area’s many rag pickers and small-scale recycling businesses. But there was no organized approach to waste management.
He started out with big ideas. He teamed up with an American waste management company and planned to build a mechanized plant that could convert wet garbage into energy — compressed natural gas and electricity. But the ambitious plan, which required $16.5-million ( U.S. ) in seed capital, ran into bureaucratic hurdles.
He didn’t lose hope. In Barrie, Ont., he visited a mechanized de-worming plant and began to draw up plans to start a vermicomposting (worm composting) plant using the same process.
And so, with much reduced startup capital of $120,000 raised through bank loans and family assistance, Mr. Thapar launched Eco Wise. He set up 60 compost beds on leased land, hired 90 contract labourers and bought tons of red wringer worms to get his business off the ground and running. Then he went to the Resident Welfare Association of Noida in search of business. He offered free garbage collection, blue and green recycling bins and an education program to teach parents and children about environmental concerns and waste management. He started in April with two of Noida’s 130 municipal sectors, each of which contains 30,000 homes, and less than a year later is now handling four times as much waste for eight sectors in Noida.
Moreover, Eco Wise isn’t a classic small-scale Indian business. Mr. Thapar’s employees were drawn to his company because of its unusually protective labour practices. Mr. Thapar’s monthly costs include health benefits for all his workers. Employees and their families flock to the plant every Sunday for a free barbecue, and several of them will soon be provided free accommodation on company property. Most of them are migrant workers from Bihar and Bengal who make about 5,000 rupees ($133 Canadian) a month, a pittance by Canadian standards but above the average salary of a government worker.
Eco Wise is already the biggest plant of its kind in New Delhi and Noida. “We have the capacity of 100 tons per month. We are running at only 45 tons at the moment,” Mr. Thapar says. He hopes to be servicing all of Noida’s 130 sectors soon.
But all that’s only a short-term plan. What Mr. Thapar really wants to do is make energy out of waste and is excited about “bringing ideas that haven’t been tried and tested in India back here.” He wants to set up an anaerobic digestion plant, which takes wet garbage and converts it into compressed natural gas and electricity for domestic and commercial consumption.
For the time being, however, Mr. Thapar’s energies are focused on pushing people to be more enthusiastic about sorting through their garbage and using the recycling bins provided by Eco Wise. That, he acknowledges is an uphill task. “Even my friends told me, ‘Why are you getting into such a dirty business?’ It will take a long time to change that mentality.”

Popularity: 14% [?]