Hand-pulled rickshaws to be taken off Kolkata roads
The chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is ready to take the bull by the horns.
By TNN |
KOLKATA: Hand-pulled rickshaws on city roads in Kolkata are being withdrawn. This now is final. Hazari Pal of The City of Joy will perhaps have to go back to Bihar from where he had come or else he’ll have to be rehabilitated.
That’s where the controversy is buried. The registered rickshaws figure of some 5000-odd hardly gives an idea of the size of this century-old transport system that every single household has taken advantage of sometime or other in the last 100 years or more. Unregistered rickshaws by a rough police guess exceeds 50,000 and given that a single rickshaw is pulled at various times of the day and night by as many as three, sometimes four men by rotation -- there is a huge unemployment issue that is just waiting to explode.
But chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is ready to take the bull by the horns. The 1919 Calcutta Hackney Carriage Act is being amended and hand-pulled rickshaws are set to get withdrawn. The Left Front government had been trying to get this amendment done for the last two years, but have been unsuccessful largely due to the Opposition protest. This time, however, the Bill for the amendment will be tabled again and the Left Front will get it passed in the Assembly where it has a mind-boggling 234 seats in a 249 member House.
In the local lingo, these two-wheeled contraptions are called “tana” rickshaws, meaning that these are pulled by hand and are therefore different from those that can be cycled along and are therefore called “cycle rickshaws”.
The few lakhs of “ricky babas” as many in the sprawling Anglo-Indian community of the city are said to have endearingly called the pullers of these rickshaws, have a union which is led by Congress strongman Somen Mitra. Mr Mitra is said to have called for a rehab of these rickshaw pullers who, for all practical purposes, will now be without a livelihood. The Trinamool Congress has already said it’s not agreeing to the withdrawl of these rickety vehicles.
On Monday, the select committee to which the Bill was referred to earlier after its passage was blocked by the Opposition parties in the assembly, met to decide that Bill will be tabled again. The chief minister himself is the chairman of the committee and he has promised a rehab package for the rickshaw pullers.
New licences have long stopped getting issued, a fact that mayor Bikash Bhattacharjee corroborated to ET. However, the figures given out by the Mayor do not seem to tally with common perceptions. “As far as I remember, there are about 380 licensed rickshaw pullers in Kolkata and about 3800 rickshaws have licences to operate” he said. However, even the government’s own figures are at variance. On Monday, the chief minister said that officially there were 5,937 licenced rickshaws in Kolkata.
Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) and city police circles confess, however, that the actual number of rickshaws plying on city roads is much more. The figure given out is between 40,000 to 50,000 such vehicles.
Sudip Banerjee, Congress MLA and a member of the select committee told ET that the party is stressing on the rehab package very seriously. A number of proposals are said to have been forwarded to the government to this effect. One such involves re-locating some of these rickshaws to Rajarhat in North 24-Parganas, which is fast developing as a residential-cum-industry zone.
“Some rickshaw pullers are literate and they can be engaged in running several car-parking zones within the jurisdiction of KMC,” a senior Congress MLA said.
That’s where the controversy is buried. The registered rickshaws figure of some 5000-odd hardly gives an idea of the size of this century-old transport system that every single household has taken advantage of sometime or other in the last 100 years or more. Unregistered rickshaws by a rough police guess exceeds 50,000 and given that a single rickshaw is pulled at various times of the day and night by as many as three, sometimes four men by rotation -- there is a huge unemployment issue that is just waiting to explode.
But chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is ready to take the bull by the horns. The 1919 Calcutta Hackney Carriage Act is being amended and hand-pulled rickshaws are set to get withdrawn. The Left Front government had been trying to get this amendment done for the last two years, but have been unsuccessful largely due to the Opposition protest. This time, however, the Bill for the amendment will be tabled again and the Left Front will get it passed in the Assembly where it has a mind-boggling 234 seats in a 249 member House.
In the local lingo, these two-wheeled contraptions are called “tana” rickshaws, meaning that these are pulled by hand and are therefore different from those that can be cycled along and are therefore called “cycle rickshaws”.
The few lakhs of “ricky babas” as many in the sprawling Anglo-Indian community of the city are said to have endearingly called the pullers of these rickshaws, have a union which is led by Congress strongman Somen Mitra. Mr Mitra is said to have called for a rehab of these rickshaw pullers who, for all practical purposes, will now be without a livelihood. The Trinamool Congress has already said it’s not agreeing to the withdrawl of these rickety vehicles.
On Monday, the select committee to which the Bill was referred to earlier after its passage was blocked by the Opposition parties in the assembly, met to decide that Bill will be tabled again. The chief minister himself is the chairman of the committee and he has promised a rehab package for the rickshaw pullers.
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New licences have long stopped getting issued, a fact that mayor Bikash Bhattacharjee corroborated to ET. However, the figures given out by the Mayor do not seem to tally with common perceptions. “As far as I remember, there are about 380 licensed rickshaw pullers in Kolkata and about 3800 rickshaws have licences to operate” he said. However, even the government’s own figures are at variance. On Monday, the chief minister said that officially there were 5,937 licenced rickshaws in Kolkata.
Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) and city police circles confess, however, that the actual number of rickshaws plying on city roads is much more. The figure given out is between 40,000 to 50,000 such vehicles.
Sudip Banerjee, Congress MLA and a member of the select committee told ET that the party is stressing on the rehab package very seriously. A number of proposals are said to have been forwarded to the government to this effect. One such involves re-locating some of these rickshaws to Rajarhat in North 24-Parganas, which is fast developing as a residential-cum-industry zone.
“Some rickshaw pullers are literate and they can be engaged in running several car-parking zones within the jurisdiction of KMC,” a senior Congress MLA said.
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