Barun Roy: Humans, not horses

ASIA FILE

Hand-drawn rickshaws demean human dignity. They must go off Kolkata roads

There are only two other places in Asia, besides Kolkata, where the human-drawn rickshaw can still be seen: at the Toyota Museum in Japan's Aichi Prefecture and the Star Ferry pier on the island side of Hong Kong where foreign tourists ride one to get photographed in.

Well, actually three. There's a restaurant in Beijing, the Tan Gen Yuan, which maintains a fleet of human-drawn rickshaws to ferry guests from the car park a short distance from where it's located.

Everywhere else in Asia this inhuman relic from the past, once a common feature associated with the Orient, like the snake charmer or the boy on the buffalo, has disappeared, and now Kolkata wants to banish them too. If it does eventually succeed, after so many failed attempts in the past, it will have got rid of something that's universally regarded as demeaning to human dignity.

One wonders why it has taken the Left leaders of West Bengal so long to banish something that's so grossly associated with man's exploitation of man. After its accidental birth in Japan around 1870, the human-drawn rickshaw "" the jinricksha as it used to be called "" became widely popular throughout Asia as a means of cheap, short-distance transport. But by 1912, it was already in decline in Japan and after the Second World War it was practically gone from everywhere else but Kolkata.

Is it pity for the poor rickshawallah and a concern for his livelihood that have kept the so-called "tradition" alive? Well, that's the theory, a self-righteous argument that also condones the aggressive invasion of Kolkata's sidewalks by hawkers. But the political motives aren't too far to fetch.

Such marginal people always make faithful voters and are often allowed to operate illegally to make them doubly so. Officially, they can't be disturbed unless suitable alternative arrangements are made. In reality, suitable alternatives, for obvious reasons, are never found.

This time, however, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has announced a concrete deadline of four to five months for phasing out Kolkata's 20,000, mostly unlicensed, human-pulled rickshaws.

So, the search for alternatives is likely to be more serious; and, the choices being very limited, we are probably going to see more licenses being issued for new cycle-rickshaws and "autos".

That's something we must worry about. In many Asian countries, as human-drawn rickshaws came to be banned for its inherent inhumanity and slowness of speed, human-pedalled rickshaws appeared as the most obvious alternative, along with other such variations as trishaws, sidecars, pedicabs and cyclos.

Because of the sheer numbers of these new, often unlicensed, vehicles, urban traffic in many of these countries has come under enormous pressures and the authorities are finding it hard to cope. Dhaka, with some 500,000 cycle-rickshaws, which occupy about 73 per cent of the city's road space, is perhaps the worst example of what can happen if transport solutions are unplanned.

There was a time when Jakarta was swamped by over 100,000 three-wheeled rickshaws called becaks. They became such a menace that at one point the authorities were literally grabbing thousands of becaks and dumping them into the sea.

Their routes were taken over by motorised three-wheelers called bemos. But the becaks, exploiting popular sympathy, kept reappearing from time to time while bemos kept growing in numbers, worsening an already untenable situation.

There still are over 7,000 becaks in Jakarta, and powerful non-government organisations are resisting the move to ban them, saying it will destroy an established Jakarta tradition.

A similar situation might arise in Kolkata. There is every likelihood that the demise of the human-drawn rickshaw, if at all it takes place, will inflate the city's population of cycle-rickshaws even as the threat to its traffic from auto-rickshaws keeps growing by the day.

The consequences are going to be nightmarish, given all kinds of other obstructions that make Kolkata's traffic a daily hurdle race for its driving and non-driving populations alike.

What can Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee do about that? Very little, because deep down the problem is one of a lack of intelligent traffic planning. In Kolkata, as in many other cities, the so-called cheap modes of transport are seen, not as a traffic complement, but as a convenient means of doling out political favour, nurturing cadres, and building up vote banks.

It's the same attitude that abets motivated handouts of bus and minibus licenses, without the slightest consideration for road and traffic capacity and in utter disregard of the necessity to develop mass rapid transit systems. Unless the attitude itself undergoes a change, Kolkata can never expect to have a modern city transport.

The wisdom has finally dawned on the Indonesians and Jakarta has begun to develop planned mass transit corridors, both rail- and bus-based. In Buddhadeb's Kolkata, there's not even the faintest glimmer of understanding what the problem really is.