THE LAST OF THE RICKSHAW PULLERS

Kolkata’s (Calcutta) rickshaw pullers work in the rain. This congested city was the first city of the colonial British and now it is the only city of India where hand pulled rickshaws are still being pulled. In 1996, the Government of West Bengal announced that it was intending to ban the rickshaws to relieve traffic congestion but it never was fully enforced. In 2007, the government again pushed to have the ban enforced, claiming the reason being, “The sight of a human pulling other humans for a pittance is a blot on the image of today’s Kolkata, We shall make our best effort to see that finally no hand-pulled rickshaw exists on the street of Kolkata." All photographs by Ami Vitale

By Kim Petersen

DISSIDENT VOICE

May 4th, 2012

When the Communists came to power in China, one of their first acts was to abolish the hand-pulled rickshaw. What an irony that in the second decade of the 21st century, the Communist leaders in West Bengal wait for the remaining rickshaw-pullers to die! ~ A.J. Philip¹

A rickshaw puller, unable to even afford shoes, risks getting a ticket and his rickshaw confiscated by going against the grain of traffic to shorten his trip in Burro Bazaar. “If the police stop me from pulling my rickshaw, I don’t want to turn into a beggar in this city where I have worked with dignity for 38 years.” Most of the pullers come seeking a better life from the nearby state of Bihar which is the most impoverished in India.

The Esplanade district is a large commercial area in the heart of Kolkata, India. On a warm February day while heading toward the markets on Lindsay Street, I observed a pair of rickshaw pullers hauling their human cargo along at a brisk trot.

One block over on Sudder Road, where most of the backpackers hang out, sat a wiry bare-foot man wearing a lungi (skirt) and a gumcha (cloth) wrapped around his head. His name is Mohammad Salim. He is a 62-year-old husband and father of six children from Bihar, in the north of India, and he is one of the last rickshaw pullers.
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Rickshaw pullers, right to left from front, Akim, (sleeping), Moslim, Yaseen, Naim (mustache) Mohammed Yakub, Lal Babu and Firdah Hussein (lying down in back) rest and have a smoke inside a deera on Alimudden Street. Around a hundred men from the nearby state of Bihar share these cramped quarters, leaving their families behind because they can not afford to live with them in the “City of Joy”, Kolkata, India.

Kolkata is the last place in the world where people earn a living at as what some describe as “human beasts of burden.”

Salim was eager to be interviewed about his job, and his colleague, Mohammad Raju, 35, married with four children, joined in.

During this time of year (February when the interview took place), they said they earned about 100 to 200 Rupees a day ($1C=50 Rupees); on a really good day, they earned 300 Rupees. It cost about 100 Rupees a day to eat, and one can imagine that these men burn many calories a day transporting people and their goods hither and thither.

Kolkata’s poorest residents, the rickshaw pullers often can not afford to even stay in a dera or afford health care when they fall ill. “What the government is attempting to do [by imposing the ban] is an anti-poor step by the Communist leaders who always said they were fighting for the poor.” Some rickshaw wallahs are resigned to the imminent end of their livelihood and pin their hopes on being offered Kolkata’s (Calcutta) rickshaw pullers wash and cook in their dera.

Rickshaw pulling is a male-only occupation. The pullers laughed when I asked whether a woman might do such work. “It is too dangerous,” they said, not mentioning any physical limitations.

They said their customers are both Indians and tourists. Depending on the trip, they usually charged the Indians about 20 Rupees and the tourists 30-40 Rupees. The price was per trip and not per number of passengers.

It was not uncommon to see two corpulent passengers with many bags of goods being trotted home by the lean rickshaw pullers ~ like scenes straight out of Aravind Adiga’s, The White Tiger: “thin stick men, leaning forward … bearing a pyramid of middle-class flesh – some fat man with his fat wife and all their shopping bags and groceries.”²

Mohammed Yakub cooks lunch as his mother Shanaz brings his child Nadia for a rare visit. The vast majority of rickshaw wallahs come from Bihar and once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera ~ a combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2.50) a month and they only visit their home once or twice a year if they are lucky. This was an extraordinary scene, one which rarely happens for most rickshaw pullers who never get to see their children and share the joys of watching them grow up.

The rickshaw has two large wheels and between there is a simple seat with low backing, about a meter above the ground, where the customers seat themselves with their bags. The rickshaw puller lifts the vehicle by means of two parallel poles an arm’s width apart. Most of the pullers rent their rickshaws. Sadar Ali, 44, from Bargona, Sundarban, is the father of three boys and one girl. He said he rents his rickshaw for 25 Rupees a day from the Salvation Army.

More rickshaw pullers joined our group. They were very forthcoming about the details of their livelihood.

One newcomer, Mohammad Edad, the 58-year-old father of four, told of his longest trips being about 10 kilometers, for which he received about 100-150 Rupees.

Vivek Pasman sleeps next to his father, rickshaw puller Pankaj Pasman outside of Kali temple in South Kolkata (Calcutta). The family moved to Kolkata 40 years ago from Bihar and once lived in small huts in this exact location but the city grew around them and they were forced out of their homes and onto the pavement. The family has been living on the sidewalk where their huts once were for the past forty years. They have chosen to stay with their families and live without a home rather than live in a dera. They gross between 100 and 150 rupees a day, out of which they have to pay 20 rupees for the use of the rickshaw and an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if a policeman stops them for, say, crossing a street where rickshaws are prohibited.

Sixty-year-old Firoj from Lashmikantpor said sometimes the bags of passengers would be 20 kilograms.

Because these rickshaw pullers were Muslim, they worked Saturday to Thursday, taking Fridays off. They said the rickshaw pullers were about half Muslim, half Hindus, adding that they all got along well.

Generally, they said other traffic was respectful to the rickshaw pullers, and they plied their trade in the narrow lanes where vehicles have more difficulty maneuvering. The main competition was from the Ambassador taxis.

They said that they would stop pulling a rickshaw if another kind of job was available, but that they were content.

The families of rickshaw pullers play with the youngest child next to the Kali Temple in Southern Kolkata. The baby’s name is Nandini Rai and to the right , Mongal Rai, 13 (checkered shirt) and to the left Isna Rai, 12. A 2003 study found that rickshaw wallahs are near the bottom of Kolkata occupations in income, doing better than only the rag-pickers and the beggars. For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar.

 
Salim said, “Money makes happy. The only business is money. [I] do it for the money.”

Raju is from Kolkata, where he lives with his family. Salim stays in Kolkata for 4 to 5 months, and then he heads back north to his family in Bihar during the low season.

The best season for working, they all agreed, was monsoon season. Then, the streets are flooded; it is difficult to walk, and cars cannot drive. They indicated by sweeping their hand with palm in-turned that the water level was up to their hips. During this season, they said they made 1000 Rupees a day.

The push is to eliminate rickshaw pulling from the last place on the planet.

Without them, however, other jobs will need to be provided for Salim, Raju, and their colleagues, and during monsoon season, people will have to find another way to get to where they are going.

 

 

Kolkata’s (Calcutta) rickshaw pullers work day and night around New Market. There are people in Kolkata, particularly educated and politically aware people, who will not ride in a rickshaw because they are offended by the idea of being pulled by another human being or because they consider it not the sort of thing people of their station do or because they regard the hand-pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism. Ironically, some of those people are not enthusiastic about banning rickshaws. “I refuse to be carried by another human being myself,” one man said, “but I question whether we have the right to take away their livelihood.” Rickshaw supporters point out that when it comes to demeaning occupations, rickshaw wallahs are hardly unique in Kolkata. If they ban the pullers, most believe they will have to find a job far more humiliating than their current post.

 

Kolkata’s (Calcutta) rickshaw pullers take children to school and people to work around Ripon Street in central Calcutta. The rickshaw pullers steadiest customers are schoolchildren. Middle-class families contract with a puller to take a child to school and pick him up; the puller essentially becomes a family retainer. Ironically, they become the trusted and beloved part of the family and yet they can not see their own children who live far away in Bihar.

Kolkata’s (Calcutta) rickshaw pullers work around New Market. People use rickshaws as a 24-hour ambulance service; Proprietors of cafes or corner stores send rickshaws to collect their supplies. Many hotels use them to bring produce and chickens tied in pairs by the feet so they could be draped over the shafts and the folded back canopy and even the axle.

Rickshaw pullers work through the flooded streets of central Kolkata (Calcutta) around Chittaranjee Street. From June to September Kolkata can get torrential rains, and its drainage system doesn’t need torrential rain to begin backing up. Residents who favor a touch of hyperbole say that in Kolkata “if a stray cat pees, there’s a flood.” When it’s raining, the normal customer base for rickshaw wallahs expands greatly, as does the price of a journey. When it rains, even the governor, who wants them banned, takes rickshaws.

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Kolkata’s poorest residents, the rickshaw pullers often can not afford to even stay in a dera or afford health care when they fall ill. “What the government is attempting to do [by imposing the ban] is an anti-poor step by the Communist leaders who always said they were fighting for the poor.” Some rickshaw wallahs are resigned to the imminent end of their livelihood and pin their hopes on being offered something in its place. As migrant workers, they don’t have the political clout enjoyed by Kolkata’s sidewalk hawkers who, after supposedly being scaled back at the beginning of the modernization drive, still clog the sidewalks, selling absolutely everything. “The government was the government of the poor people,” one sardar said. “Now they shake hands with the capitalists and try to get rid of poor people.