[sustran] Meanwhile: The rickshaw's last stand

[Eric Britton]

[If I may sneak a word in here, it strikes me that after all these years that
here are the key issues that need to be sorted out for this or any other Global
South Mobility issue:

 

1.	Does this mode provide useful mobility services?
2.	Is it affordable and available to poorer people?
3.	Is it putting an important economic strain on the community?
4.	Does it provide paid work for people who want to do it?
5.	If there is stuff that is wrong with it (long list here), and what point
by point can be done to shorten and soften this list?
6.	Will an appropriately cleaned up version of it contribute to sustainable
development and social justice - and a softer, safer and better city.
7.	If the mode is suppressed who wins and who loses?  And what is their
economic bracket?

 

It always strikes me that those who take up arms against these modes seem have
no deep feeling for what is happening on the street and in these communities,
and take to it an abstract deus ex machina attitude I am not sure that this is
the stuff of good policy and democracy. Now on the Datta-Ray's version of the
story.]

 

 

Meanwhile: The rickshaw's last stand 

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray International Herald Tribune 

 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 9, 2006
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2006/08/09/opinion/edray.ph
p

 

 

 <http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=CALCUTTA&sort=swishrank> CALCUTTA
Calcutta's hand-drawn rickshaws - the last in the world - were granted a
reprieve while elsewhere India's government clamped down on blogs and Internet
cafes to prevent cyber attacks. That's India's diversity for you.

The rickshaw has been dying a long time. The last license was issued in 1945. A
bill to abolish the humble vehicle - its name derived from the Japanese
jinrikisha (jin, human; riki, force; sha, vehicle - "human-powered vehicle") -
was introduced last year in the West Bengal legislature but has been sent to a
select committee for further discussion.

This dithering highlights a major difference between China and India. Mao
abolished rickshaws in one sweep, but Indian politicians, trade union leaders
and nongovernmental organizations have been arguing all these years that a ban
would deprive thousands of poor laborers of their only means of livelihood.
Rickshaws are cheap, safe and clean, unlike Calcutta buses belching black clouds
of diesel fumes.

The opposing argument is that rickshaws violate the dignity of man. The puller
sweats it out in unbearably hot temperatures or wades through flooded streets
for a pittance. It's back- breaking work, and tuberculosis is an occupational
hazard for pullers who often live on the pavement, scrimping and saving to send
a few cents home.

Other forces are also at work. Calcutta had only 6,000 licensed rickshaws in the
1990s when more than 30,000 plied the streets. If you looked at the license
plates of many vehicles, you saw only squiggles instead of numbers. If you were
trundling along in one - which I wouldn't for love or money - and your journey
lay past a police station, the rickshaw puller flatly refused to take you.

Illegal rickshaws weren't quite rogue operators. They were owned by influential
citizens, including policemen, who rented them to the pullers for a few rupees
per shift. If caught, it was the poor puller who was fined. One often saw rows
of rickshaws - the ones that didn't get away - lined up outside police stations.

Hand-pulled at first, then cycle driven, rickshaws have been used at one time or
another in Tokyo, Kyoto, Hong Kong, Dhaka and most Southeast Asian cities. They
first became popular in Japan in the late 19th century, the early Meiji period,
replacing horse- drawn palanquins. Men were faster and cheaper than horses.

India's rickshaws appeared first in Simla, where British viceroys escaped the
summer heat. The elite had their own vehicles with liveried pullers, and
observed strict protocol. The young Maharani of Kapurthala was reprimanded for
bowling away in her rickshaw from the theater before a British burra memsahib
could summon hers.

Calcutta's flourishing Chinese traders originally used rickshaws to transport
goods; in 1914 they applied for permission to carry passengers as well. Soon,
pulling a rickshaw became a peasant's first job on migrating to the city. Many
stayed with it for life. In Roland Joffe's 1992 film "City of Joy," based on
Dominique Lapierre's eponymous novel, the Indian actor Om Puri, playing a
hard-pressed rickshaw puller who hasn't abandoned hope, encounters an American
doctor, played by Patrick Swayze, fleeing the West with no hope at all.

West Bengal's governing Marxists are moving cautiously. First, several major
Calcutta streets were closed to rickshaw traffic. Then, more than 12,000
rickshaws were seized and destroyed. The policy of not renewing licenses has
brought down the number to 1,800. The West Bengal chief minister, Buddhdeb
Bhattacharjee, promises a total ban next year.

There are many theories about the rickshaw's origins. Three Americans - a
Massachusetts blacksmith, a Baptist minister and a missionary in Yokohama whose
invalid wife needed to get about - have been credited with the invention. So has
an Englishman known as "Public-spirited Smith." The Japanese say it was the work
of three Japanese whom the Tokyo authorities permitted to build and sell
rickshaws, providing one of them put his stamp on every license to operate a
rickshaw.

Indians are not in the picture. But Calcutta is the rickshaw's last stand; and a
monsoon outbreak may have contributed to the last minute reprieve. Only
rickshaws can brave the city's flooded streets in which cars and buses are
regularly stalled.

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray is former Editor of The Statesman newspaper in Indian.

 

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