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.”
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