This is where the cycle rickshaws come in. On Fifth Avenue in the evenings these days you see cycle rickshaws tooling around looking for customers. The rickshaws seem easier to operate but otherwise they are much the same. Unlike in our country where rickshaws are symbols of poverty, they are seen here as symbols of the future — an environment-friendly means of transport. We need to change our attitude to them, because in India they are a vital means of employment for the poorest of our citizens.

And, they could be cheaper and less polluting public transport in congested areas of our big cities if municipalities would stop treating them as a nuisance. The number of cars in our cities is not restricted but cycle rickshaws are. Does this make sense?

In overcrowded parts of our big cities and towns, it would make more sense to restrict motorised transport, but we do not do this because the Indian state sees cars as a symbol of prosperity and rickshaws as symbols of shame. The same attitude exists towards pavement shops. In Mumbai and Delhi, hundreds of thousands of our citizens would escape extreme poverty and join the middle class if they were allowed to run their meagre businesses off city pavements but they are forced back into poverty in the name of civic order.

Pavement hawkers need regulation in terms of cleanliness and areas of operation; they do not need restrictions of the kind that create the vast structure of municipal corruption that currently exists.

... contd.