‘Human Horses’ Defy Calcutta Rickshaw Ban

Travel Blog • Eva Holland • 09.13.07 | 12:00 PM ET

For more than a century, hand-pulled rickshaws have rolled through the busy streets and narrow alleys of Calcutta—or Kolkata (yes, we got the memo). But last month the BBC reported that the state government of West Bengal would be banning Calcutta’s famous human-powered transport. Now, the AFP has released this video report showing both rickshaw pullers and regular customers voicing their opposition to the ban. One customer noted that they were the only affordable transport for the injured or the sick, and wondered about compensation or re-training for the pullers. One rickshaw-puller said simply, “I have never done anything else.”

The video lists tuberculosis and blistered feet among the many health problems suffered by the pullers, and state officials have argued the move is for their benefit, calling the rickshaw tradition “inhuman” and “little more than slave labour.” The BBC quoted the chief minister of West Bengal in its initial report: “Nowhere else in the world does this practice exist and we think it should also cease to exist in Calcutta.”

I have to respectfully disagree with the chief minister on that last point. Hand-pulled rickshaws exist in several North American cities, including my own hometown of Ottawa.

I spent two summers in college pulling a rickshaw part-time and had plenty of people tell me that I was being exploited, or that my job was slave labor. But aside from the occasional slavery references, I doubt my experience held much in common with that of the pullers in Calcutta. For one thing, we ran with the latest Adidas or Nike technology on our feet. And for another, I’d be shocked if any of Calcutta’s 18,000 rickshaw-wallahs have ever earned a dollar a minute.

If West Bengal follows through with the ban, it will be strange to see the last of the original Asian rickshaws fade away, leaving only North America’s bizarre tourist-driven parodies to carry on the tradition.

Photo by Achakladar via Flickr, (Creative Commons).