METRO LIFELINE FOR CAPITAL RICKSHAW-PULLERS

NEW DELHI: Umesh Chand was on his way home on Saturday when at about 9pm, he got a call from a relative, informing him that Metro trains will restart soon. He immediately confirmed the news on his mobile phone.

For the past few days, Chand, a rickshaw-puller, had been thinking of returning to his village as his income had dipped drastically. “I used to make ₹600 every day; these days I am lucky if I make ₹150. Getting passengers has been a struggle after the Metro closed. Now that the Metro is reopening, I will stay back in Delhi,” says Chand, sitting in his rickshaw at the Moolchand Metro Station, right next to a signboard that marks the area as a ‘halt-and-go’ parking space for cycle and auto rickshaws.

He was the only rickshawpuller in the parking, which had been overtaken by cars belonging to customers of a popular paratha joint at the station, which is doing brisk business.

“Before Metro stopped its services, this parking used to have more than 100 rickshaws, all parked in a queue, waiting for passengers, and they never had to wait for more than a few minutes. Rickshawpullers in Delhi cannot survive without the Metro,” says Chand, who is from Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh and has been pulling a rickshaw in the city for almost 12 years.

Talk to any rickshaw-puller in the city — there are about 600,000 of them, most of them seasonal migrants from UP and Bihar — and they will tell you how their lives came to a halt and their income fell by 80% after the Metro suspended its services in March due to the coronavirus crisis.

The rickshaw-pullers who earlier used to make anything between 500 and 700 per day, now barely made ₹100-150, with the wait for passengers stretching for hours.

Gone were the long queues of rickshaw-pullers at Metro stations, which ensured a steady flow of passengers throughout the day.

The fate of the humble rickshaw in the Capital has been closely tied to the Delhi Metro ever since the latter came to the city.