Rickshaw Shadowing

After touring the Rickshaw Bank factory on Monday, we headed into Guwahati to gather more insight into the work patterns of rickshaw pullers. With the help of Dr. Sarmah’s nephew, Avi, we were able to explain to a few friendly Rickshaw Bank pullers what our aims were: we wanted to shadow a rickshaw-wallah going through his daily routine by following him in another rickshaw. After a bunch of CBI (the Indian version of the FBI) jokes, we got going. We were able to quickly hire some pullers, and took off on our first ride around Six Mile… rapidly falling behind our lead rickshaw. Apparently Varun and I together provide a resistance that is a little bit more than a school-age kid.

After some failed gesturing about how we were too large and we should create a caravan of three rickshaws instead of two, we called Avi, who came to our rescue with his excellent translation. We rode back to the rickshaw-stand with the pullers and found another rickshaw-wallah to join our “CBI” group. After some socializing with the pullers (Varun discovered he can speak Hindi) an unsuspecting young man hired our lead man, and we were off on the chase.

We followed the lead puller for nearly two non-stop hours, during which we got to see quite a diverse section of Guwahati. While this exercise is probably not statistically significant, it was quite enlightening and some of our observations are listed below:

1. Guwahati is very flat – except for speedbumps. For even small inclines the older pullers will get off and push the rickshaw instead of riding or half-pedaling, while younger riders will struggle through. For speedbumps, the pullers speed up in anticipation of getting over the hump (my back hurts now).
2. There was a surprisingly small amount of stop and go, or even braking that could be used regeneratively. This is perhaps in contrast with what we observed in Delhi, where city traffic forced the rickshaws to move slowly. From talking to the pullers and Avi, we gathered that in Guwahati traffic does not force the rickshaws to stop – it instead forces them into the rougher side streets where they can ride more freely.
3. Demand seemed to be pretty high – we were told that if you wanted to get a passenger, you could. And this played out in our shadowing. The lead puller was without a passenger less than 20% of the time.
4. Pay is low, but not terrible. In the two hours we followed our lead puller, he earned 145 Rs. This was mid-day, and traffic was not bad.
5. The roads were rough, and made it very difficult to write legibly while riding.

After shadowing, we were treated to a wonderful Assamese lunch at Avi’s house, and retreated to the Rickshaw Bank office to plan our next move.

Rickshaws lined up to collect passengers.

Our shadowing caravan, from the rear.