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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Reportage |
Hard Road To Travel
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| Twenty million Mumbaikars depend on the services of 600,000 auto-rickshaw drivers most of them migrants, who live in a different Mumbai. Here’s a map. |
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Published : 1 December 2010 |
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY SHUBASH SHARMA |
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UMBAI IS HOME to nearly 20 million people, but none are as ubiquitous—and as faceless—as the city’s auto-rickshaw drivers. There are so many autos in Mumbai now that they exceed all order and management, and even the drivers have difficulty estimating their numbers. Some drivers I met thought there might be 100,000 rickshaws in all, while |
some put the figure at 300,000. One young and somewhat starstruck driver, Imran Ali of Dahisar, said “Karodon honge” (there must be millions).
In Mumbai’s extensive, ever-expanding suburbs, beyond the boundaries of the island city (where they have never been allowed to ply) the auto-rickshaws are to be found on every street and corner. The puttering of their engines is the most familiar sound on Mumbai’s streets; their happy-go-lucky near-right-angle swerves are the most striking moves in the city’s sweaty, hustling traffic; and even they are turned in for the night they can be counted on the roadside in the hundreds.
There are far more drivers than rickshaws: few own their own vehicle, which means that most autos in Mumbai are rented first by a driver and only second by his passengers. Every hired auto usually runs a day and a night shift, supporting two drivers and generating two rental fees each day for its owner (each about 150 or 200 rupees). Many drivers are part of Mumbai’s army of migrant labour: they often return to their villages for months at a time, creating temporary vacancies for new drivers just arriving in the city.
The most common estimates suggest that Mumbai is home to between 250,000 and 300,000 autos, and if one accounts for at least two drivers per vehicle then there must be about 600,000 rickshaw drivers in the city—about three percent of the population. This is a group bigger than almost any other professional class or guild in the city. A person in Mumbai could take a rickshaw every day of their working life and never see the same driver twice—that is, if he or she took care to notice.
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VERY PROFESSION has subtle hierarchies that remain invisible to outsiders. Listening to the drivers, one learns all the ways in which they privately register their differences from one another under the white and brown uniforms and detached manner that might suggest, like the black-and-yellow of the mass-manufactured vehicles, that they are all
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more or less the same.
For an auto to run legally in Mumbai, it must possess a permit, and its driver must possess a license and a numbered badge. One group of rickshaw drivers is registered with the road transport authority of the city; they have their own badges. But now the state no longer issues fresh badges because of the glut of drivers in the city (though many drivers suspect that this is a conspiracy in which the anti-migrant party, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, led by the belligerent Shiv Sena defector Raj Thackeray, has a hand). So a far larger contingent of drivers proceeds badge-less, operating illegally and subject to a 100-rupee fine each time a traffic constable catches them in the act. A driver without a badge lives in envy of those who have one.
Then there are drivers who are old hands in Mumbai, as much at ease on its violently animated streets as they are in their own beds, and then there are those who are new to the city, still coming to terms with its ways.
Some drivers are Marathi-speaking locals, but most are migrants—perhaps the most important distinction in today’s Mumbai, a city less hospitable to outsiders than it was in the past. There are those who have their families living with them, and those who have left them in a village back home; those who need to send money home, and those who do not; those who work day shifts, and those who choose the greater risks and rewards that come with the night shift—higher fares and longer distances, but fewer customers, some of whom refuse to pay. There are those whose autos have four-stroke engines (which can be ignited with a turn of a key, like a car), and those who have two-strokes, and must pump a lever to get their vehicles started.
Finally, there are those rickshaw drivers who have settled into their professional skins, and who accept that this is what they will do all their lives, and those who hate the work and keep plotting their escape, for years or sometimes even decades, into a trade that offers more income or respect.
If there is one trait that seems to unite all the city’s rickshaw drivers, it is that they almost always drive barefoot, with their footwear, usually chappals, neatly tucked away on one side. Even more significantly, the auto-drivers share a common perception of the city and its geography, which divides neatly into a Mumbai they know and a Mumbai they do not. This is because they are not allowed to drive in central and south Mumbai—a triangle of land with Colaba at the bottom and Bandra and Sion at the top. The classic sights and scenes of the city—the Gateway of India, the Taj Mahal hotel, Marine Drive and Chowpatty Beach, Chhatrapati Shivaji train terminus—are not part of their everyday life and figure only faintly in their imaginations. Their map of Mumbai is a suburban one, and one of its most important points is the beginning of the Western Express Highway in Bandra, where passengers heading north into the suburbs often get out of taxis to change to the cheaper autos: the point where, for a certain kind of Mumbaikar, the city comes to an end, and for auto drivers, where it begins.
The auto drivers love to talk, an opportunity denied to them by their mostly middle-class passengers, who use their time in rickshaws to transact business of their own, or else remain silent. It takes only one or two questions to loosen their tongues, and then it can be hard work keeping pace with their rambles. That said, their talk—an appealing mixture of observation and conclusion, confession and accusation, delicacy and slang, proverbs and non-sequiturs—flows only as long as their meters are running. Once the destination has been reached and the fare paid, they are reluctant to converse. This is because they are paying for every minute of their shift, and time is money.
Most of my conversations with auto drivers, therefore, took place on the road: I talked to their backs as they drove. Occasionally, I caught glimpses of their faces and expressions in the side-view mirrors of their vehicles, or they turned back to emphasise a particularly important point. Although my intention was to put a face to each driver, when I think of them now, I remember their voices more clearly than their visages.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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saurabh
2 March 2011
10:15 AM
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I found this website out by accident as I was surfing the web for cricket related news
I read The ringmaster- Modi then the IIPM truth and now this.
Simply mindblowing stuff, I am so glad I found this website the authors are great
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Anasua Roy Sarkar
1 January 2011
06:34 PM
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A wonderfully well written and insightful piece that is full of layers, both obvious and subtle!Mumbai, its auto drivers and their perspective just became more fascinating to me.Congratulations Chandrahas!Keep up the good work!
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egress63
31 December 2010
02:07 AM
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A brilliant read. It is sad to see that jobs for such people are not being created in UP so that these folks have to come all the way to Bombay for a living. And it is sad to see that Bombay is loosing its cosmopolitanism due to the likes of the MNS.
On a different note, I did not that the Autos themselves were shared between drivers.
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Sarika
28 December 2010
09:05 AM
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This article clearly expresses auto drivers and their situation. Although, as all articles written on web explores problems, we forget to propose a solution on those problems and turn them into action and execution...this growth of rickshawalas can be contorlled and managed with a proper plan with the support of Government to move them into other areas providing them shelter and reduce traffic congestion, reduce pollution and noise in Mumbal - Thane and all connecting areas and creating easy Bus access...same holds true for Taxi drivers and taxis.
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harkabir
15 December 2010
02:12 PM
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It seems that people on the roads of Bombay are headed in the direction of those in Delhi (behaviour-wise)
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Siddhesh
12 December 2010
01:00 PM
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This was a really well-researched, well-structured piece. It told me so much about the lives of rickshaw drivers in Mumbai. I particularly liked how Chandrahas rendered what they said. His use of dialogue was very RK Narayanesque. Great job!
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Bhushan Nigale
7 December 2010
03:34 PM
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This essay confirms Chandrahas’s growing stature as the one of the best young Indian writers in English. The rickshaw drivers in most Indian cities are despised by their passengers – in Bangalore, for instance groups on Facebook routinely call for observing ‘ban the rickshaw today’ days, and it takes great empathy to sympathize with their lot. Chandrahas manages to do this very well, and the ‘literariness’ of the piece nicely complements the human interest aspect of the story: not only did I love the humor in the story, I also enjoyed the dialogues: each of them conveying not only a sense of who the drivers are, but also creating in our minds a view of the city.
Great going, Chandrahas – keep it up!
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Akshay
6 December 2010
11:08 PM
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Great insightful article! Would be interesting to see a "compare & contrast", with say, the Black Cab drivers of London by the author...
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Dhiren
4 December 2010
08:28 PM
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Brilliant read.
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Aboli
4 December 2010
07:04 PM
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What a wonderful insightful read! Thank you.
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Rajesh Singh
3 December 2010
12:44 AM
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Great essay and great Photos!!
My father has been a rickshaw driver for long and I can identify with this story, I know how he has worked hard to support our family.
Congratulations to the reporter and also to the photographer because each picture tells a story and compliments the essay beautifully.
Thank you Caravan for publishing such non-news stories,( which are mostly ignored by the main stream media in favour of celebrity stories) ; it puts the lime light on the extra-ordinary common man of India,who truly deserves it.
I am looking forward to your next issue! thanks.
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VINOD JOSEPH
3 December 2010
12:39 AM
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Well written! I always found autodrivers and cabbies in Mumbai to be a very decent lot - except the ones who pick you up from the airport
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Maruthy
2 December 2010
11:09 AM
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An all inclusive and incisive article authenticating that the writer has taken the trouble to write this.I am a regular Bombaite for 50 years and always stayed in areas where autorickshaws plied.
Great reading.
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Kamal
1 December 2010
12:55 AM
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During my last enriching conversation with a rickshaw driver, I helped him get out of a situation wherein the traffic cop kept insisting that he ran a red light but the truth was that the driver picked me up right next to the signal from a spot where he couldn't have seen the red light right above him.
We got talking and he told me that the traffic cops actually prefer the migrants to be around because they get paid more by them - the local rickshaw drivers don't budge easily and are willing to escalate what they deem as unfair decisions by the traffic cops to the rickshaw unions.
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Milosz
30 November 2010
06:52 PM
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Great story! Congratulations to the reporter.
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