Rickshaw Bank Turns Employees Into Owner-Operators

Rob Katz — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 09:22:48 -0500

November 14, 2007 - 10:00, Wall Street Journal

Rickshaws Drive Entrepreneurship

Story Link: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119498305073491658.html

Teaser:
"By the moment I got down [out of the rickshaw], I forgot about it, but when I got home and had dinner and went to go to sleep, his words came back to me," he says. "So I got up and went to my calculator." A few sums indicated that the driver paid nearly half his earnings in rent -- and many times over had covered the approximate 6,500-rupee cost of a rickshaw. Mr. Sarmah decided to learn more, and the next day he prepared a questionnaire.

Pradip Kumar Sarmah was nudged into action late one night, when he recalled a conversation earlier that day with a rickshaw driver.

Like many Indians, Mr. Sarmah, a former veterinarian who in 2001 won an Ashoka fellowship for his work promoting small-scale animal husbandry in northeast India, routinely traveled in a rickshaw. There are an estimated eight million rickshaw pullers in the country, and Mr. Sarmah had used an occasion that day to learn what he could about these people's livelihoods. "Who owns your rickshaw?" Mr. Sarmah had asked. The driver gave a name -- clearly not his own. He said he had been working 16 years as a puller. "How much rent do you pay?" Mr. Sarmah asked. Twenty-five rupees a day -- about 65 U.S. cents -- came the answer.

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Rickshaw Bank Turns Employees Into Owner-Operators