Cycling as work: mobility and informality in Indian cities

Abstract

Set against the marginalization of cycling in Kolkata and Delhi, this article shows how cargo-cyclists and cycle rickshaw pullers make productive contributions to urban economies and negotiate constraints to their mobility in Indian cities. As cheap vehicles, bicycles and cycle rickshaws not only provide opportunities for social and economic mobility, but also contribute to, generate, and sustain vital urban economies. Cycle workers ensure the smooth transportation of goods, people, and services in Indian cities. Situating cycle work at the crossroads of anthropology and urban planning, this article demonstrates how the interdependence of urban economies, regulation of space, and constraints to everyday mobility advances knowledge on contemporary Indian cities. Instead of seeing these spheres as separate strands of investigation and analysis, we suggest that cycling as work draws them together.

Keywords:

• Mobility
• city
• bicycles
• cycle rickshaws
• economy
• urban planning
• informality
• transport

In Indian cities, bicycles and cycle rickshaws are ubiquitous. These cheap and flexible vehicles channel labour and services that city dwellers depend upon, and transport goods and people including the middle classes. On an everyday basis, cycling is nearly synonymous with the urban poor and informal practices. India’s urban cycle workers productively contribute to city economies. The increasing recognition of sustainable urban transport and low carbon technologies which inform urban policies (Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India 2014) have helped prioritize walking, cycling, and other Non-Motorised Transport (NMT) in India. Recent environmental activism has also promoted cycling to mitigate air pollution and the ill effects of climate change (Cervero 2013; Joshi, Joseph, and Chandran 2016; Sur 2020b).

Yet, urban governance in India continues to marginalize bicycles and cycle rickshaws as slow-moving vehicles that impede the flow of traffic. Urban planning and traffic policies treat these as nuisance vehicles that congest roads. Instead of acknowledging the ‘heterogeneity of traffic’ and provisional arrangements through which traffic is regulated in Indian cities, transport planning and management that priviledge segregation and motorized vehicles obstruct the movement of pedestrians and cyclists (Joshi, Joseph, and Chandran 2016, 25; Sur 2020b). Traffic police constables demand bribes, fine, harass, and prevent cyclists who transport goods and cycle rickshaw pullers from using many city streets and operating in elite and middle-class neighbourhoods (Joshi, Joseph, and Chandran 2016, 121; Sur 2017, 2020b). Everyday negotiations with the state and civil society, including the middle-class, produce conditions ripe for both the mobility and immobility of cycle workers.

For city dwellers who transport goods, services, and people, riding a bicycle is not just a way to get to work; it is a livelihood necessity and work in itself that helps sustain cities (Sur 2018, 2020a). Despite increasing constraints on cycling, cycle work generates livelihoods and sets urban economies into motion (Sur 2020a; Anwar and Sur 2020). By exploring cycling as work in India, this article reveals the dynamic interdependencies between urban economies, state practices, and quotidian modalities through which cities continue to be produced. Drawing on fieldwork in the cities of Kolkata and Delhi, we show how the mobility of cycle workers, marginalization of commuter cycling, governance of road space, mass transit infrastructures, and informal practices bear upon scholarly understandings of urban economies and cities. The relationship between informal economies, state planning, and everyday negotiations of urban space comprise the material-discursive formations that shape mobility and immobility in cities, what Hannam, Sheller, and Urry refer to as ‘mobilities and moorings’ (2006, 3). Similarly, in moving beyond dualist models of sedentary versus nomadic thought, or space as ‘enclaves and armatures,’ Jensen (2009) shows how meaning-making and sense-making in armature-like spaces of the city produce mobility and culture (Jensen 2009, 154). The unevenness of infrastructures and state practices, and the social structures within which cycle workers are embedded either make them mobile or impede their movement (Kauffmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006); what Peter Adey ascribes as the ‘relational politics of (im)mobilities’ (Adey 2006, 90). As Mimi Sheller importantly points out - cities and mobilities are ‘two sides of the same coin, co-constituted with and through each other’ (Sheller 2020, 13).

Set against this backdrop, we explore the ubiquity of cycle work in urban India, the constraints to cycling, and the widespread informal practices that people and states continue to engage in. We ask: how may the interdependence of cycle work, economies, regulation of space, and constraints to everyday mobility advance knowledge on contemporary Indian cities? In seeking to answer this question, we situate cycle work at the crossroads of anthropology and urban planning. Cities are far more than an aggregation of urban planning, the built environment, and transport policies. The conditions under which cyclists’ capacity to move is sometimes impeded and restricted but other times allowed and enabled are intrinsic to understanding cities. What do such practices of informality tell us about city economies? We query this further based upon our fieldwork. As an anthropologist who studies mobility and the environment, Malini conducted ethnographic fieldwork with cargo-cyclists, repair workers, cycling activists and traffic police in Kolkata for three and a half years, from 2014 until 2019. She closely followed their movements as they travelled through the city and conducted participant observation in markets, auctions, repair hubs, on roads, and at traffic intersections.¹As an architect and scholar of urban studies, Manas conducted data collection as a part of an action-research project called Aapki Sadak, in South Delhi. Between 2012 and 2015, the project involved public meetings and group discussions with members of the local Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) and over 600 neighbourhood residents, raising issues and strategies for improving pedestrian and cycling conditions, street parking, drainage, and public space safety.² We show how Kolkata’s cargo-cyclists and Delhi’s cycle rickshaw pullers make their presence felt on city roads and neighbourhoods, despite regulations and interference that constrain their movements.

In the section that follows, we gather insights from the scholarship on informal economies, bringing these in conversation with the study of mobility. Scholarship on informal economies and the regulation of space offers a productive starting point to situate cycling in Indian cities. Working across the informal and formal, notions of valued and valueless labour inform how cycle workers make a living in cities and the emerging forms of spatial governance that control their movements. In the subsequent sections, we draw on our respective fieldwork in Kolkata and Delhi to generate insights on cycling as work and its contributions to the study of urban economies and cities. The negotiations of cycle workers with urban governance, their repurposing of city infrastructures, and state agents—important subjects of inquiry in anthropology and urban studies—are best addressed from their intersections. Engaging with the pervasive bias against cycle workers, we show how the classification of the bicycle in transport and urban planning marginalizes its use for workers who are dependent on it, and how cycle workers negotiate road space and readapt transport infrastructures to move goods and people through the city.

Informal economies and urban cycling

Informal economies came under scholarly scrutiny in the 1960s and 1970s, when economists and international development experts were grappling with how to classify economic activities that were outside the purview of state control in developing countries (Ilo 1972; Lewis 1954; Moser 1978). The labour and petty commodities markets within non-western contexts challenged conventional economic wisdom on employment generation, growth, and development attributed to states. Scholars were also interested in the impact that the growing informal sector had on rural-to-urban migration and urban development in developing nations (Abu-Lughod and Hay 1977; Gilbert and Gugler 1982). Among them, Marxist scholars especially investigated questions of labour and class and the potential for political resistance against capitalism (Bayat 2000).

Keith Hart in a pioneering essay responded to the prevalent dual sector model in developmental economics to analyse the ‘urban sub-proletariat’ (Hart 1973, 61). Hart’s assessment of the informal economy in Ghana was a critique against western economic theory and the western, particularly American, views that criminalised informal employment and, in the process, dismissed these as marginal and unproductive (Hart 1973, 74). Hart further argued that these activities should not be classified as fully autonomous ‘bootstrap operation(s)’ of the entrepreneurial urban poor (Hart 1973, 89). For Hart, informal economies are, in fact, significant contributors to both economic development as well as employment generation. As such, informal markets may be externally caused by the underdevelopment of the formal sector but are also internally supported by their capacity for self-employment. Importantly for cycling as work, his understanding that people who contribute to and generate informal economies are not simply victims of the underdevelopment of the industrial and formal sector continues to be significant. In fact, as Jan Breman importantly reminds us, India’s informal economy includes minimum wage jobs and self-employed individuals across the public and private sectors, encompassing several categories of employment such as street vending, petty trading, casual labour, semi-contractual day labourers, and even illicit and illegal activities (Breman 2016, 27). His bottom-up analysis of the informal economy in India underscores the diverse interdependencies between the state, the bourgeoisie, the sub-proletariat, and 'lumpenized’ workers. For Breman, it is not just the seasonal migrant from rural regions who must find sources of employment in the city. The formal sector itself continues to operate through an ‘outsourcing of employment as well as capital’ to the growing informal economy, a relationship fostered by the increasing liberalization of markets in India (Breman 2016, 121).

Hart and Breman’s enduring insights invite scholars to rethink the boundaries between formal and informal economies in cities where the interdependence and exchange between these spheres are uneven. In fact, as we show, the economies that centre around cycle work in India defy neat classifications. Cycle workers include those who control their labour and profits, and those who depend upon wages; and contribute directly to the operation of formalized economies including markets, licensed services, and mass transit systems. They continue to be integral to urban economies even in the face of increasing constraints to cycling in Indian cities. Claudio Sopranzetti (2017) has shown how mobilities ascribe meanings to urban space, migration, law, and economic relations. As important mobile agents, Bangkok’s motorcycle taxi drivers, whom Sopranzetti studies, generate ‘channel-making labour’ that realigns and reorders the dynamics of urban capitalism and city life itself (Sopranzetti 2017, 65).

Informal practices are however, not limited to the compulsions of the working poor, and as Ananya Roy (2009) demonstrates, informality is all pervasive in urban planning and state mechanisms. Critiquing narratives that operate under the assumption that modern planning protocols and institutions are simply ‘incompetent’ or ‘unable’ to deal with the runaway informal sector, Roy highlights how the ‘idiom’ of informality functions as an important tool in the arsenal of the state to undermine its own accountability. She argues that informality is not synonymous with poverty or class, it is instead a set of practices or tactics, equally adopted by the disenfranchised masses and an increasingly deregulated state in India (2009, 77). Informality is thus a mode of operation and practice, rather than a set of characteristics that are limited to specific geographies and classes (Bunnell and Harris 2012; McFarlane 2012). State planning and policies facilitate informality in cities in ways that make everyday mobility negotiated and often dependent on the corruption, whims, and goodwill of state agents. While operating through various modes of informality, urban governance marginalizes, exploits, and dispossesses informal workers and the urban poor in the name of illegality and criminality (Davis 2006; Roy 2011; Roy and AlSayyad 2004).

Scholars of transport and mobility recognize the importance of informal activities (Hansen 2017; Møller-Jensen 2021). In China, large scale planned development such as mass transit often fails to account for everyday practices of last mile connectivity, as well as the social context in which these operate. In turn, the rapid development of mass transit is precisely what fuels the proliferation of informal economies around the facilitation of Intermediate Para Transit (IPT) modes for last mile connectivity, such as the e-bike taxi (Xia 2020). According to Xia, ‘informal transport activities take advantage of various issues caused by rapid public transport development’ and ‘provides a new way through which socially disadvantaged groups earn their livings in cities’ (2020, 829). In fact, the ubiquity of bicycles in contemporary Indian cities that supports mass transit and urban economies demonstrates the continuing value of these vehicles in the lives of the urban poor, as well as the lives of city residents across classes.

The persistence of cycling as work is a testament to the durability of the bicycle and its flexibility and affordability as a technology of mobility. Bicycles have persisted in India since their arrival as imports in nineteenth century British India. Initially used for elite mobility and recreation, their everyday use spread to the working classes and lower castes. The use of bicycles and cycle rickshaws led to social change and empowerment for marginal groups (Arnold and DeWald 2011; Arnold 2013). In post-colonial India, bicycles were manufactured and used by the working poor in cities where claims to road space and traffic congestion ushered new rivalries between motorized and non-motorized transport (Arnold 2013, 83–43, 102–104). Scholars have foregrounded the bicycle’s important role in transport, recreation, and pleasures of moving through and inhabiting cities (Tiwari, Jain, and Ramachandra Rao 2016; Jain and Tiwari 2016; Anjaria 2020). The bicycle’s adaptation with extensions, and the relative ease with which people can ride, supports urban migrant workers to use it for making a living (Samanta 2016; Sood 2012; Tiwari et al. 2008). Furthermore, its capacity to carry people and goods led to its use as a two-person vehicle with carrier over the rear wheel, as well as three or four-wheel carts for transporting goods (Arnold and DeWald 2011, 981). Cargo-cycles take technological innovation and informal adaptations beyond standardized extensions and mass-produced appendages. Indeed, India’s cargo-cycles materialize relationships that revolve around metal welding, repair, and the use of cheap ordinary objects to generate a distinctive assemblage (Sur 2020a). Cycle rickshaws can be easily mass produced at affordable prices (Samanta 2016, 312); they require low skills, and the ease of entry and joint and proprietary ownerships also enable migrant workers to make a living in cities (Sood 2012, 96). This is especially critical to the economy of rapidly growing urban areas in the global South where 'economic malaise’ and the state-led formal sector have failed to support rural-to-urban migrants (Bicycle Taxi and Handcart Operators 2008, 124). The economies that centre on cycle work also make evident how states compel the urban poor to fend for themselves (Anwar and Sur 2020). And though in economic terms the cycle rickshaw belongs in the informal economy, it is also a highly organised sector, with well-established unions allowing for a certain degree of political mobilization and advocacy with the government.

In the pages that follow, we show how city economies, public transport, and the governance of road space come into being through conflicting and negotiated relationships. Even as post-independence land use planning came to gradually eliminate mixed use activities from major cities seeking to alienating informal economies, bustling marketplaces continue to foster cycle-powered mobility. Although transport infrastructures further segregate modes of travel, such as pedestrian, NMT, automobiles, and mass transit, and generate impediments to cycling, workers negotiate these rigid structures in their everyday lives and mobilities. The development of high-speed corridors in road design have endangered slow-moving vehicles disproportionately, yet the resultant congestion of neighbourhoods and people’s need for last mile connectivity continue to support cycling economies. Finally, we explore relationships that cycle workers have with state agents such as traffic constables, and the role NGOs, activists, and neighbourhood associations play in supporting or impeding their livelihoods and mobility. Ranging from the abusive and exploitative, to mutually beneficial arrangements, cycle workers must negotiate with various actors that have power over them, while continuing to contribute to the urban economy.

Regulating urban space, informal economies and everyday mobility

At dawn when Kolkata’s fish auctions come to life, cargo-cyclists are seen quickly arriving and exiting the auctions. Starting at 3:30 a.m., auctioneers open their stores, take out their weighing scales, and wait for the arrival of local cargo-cyclists and inter-state trucks. Soon a steady stream of cyclists rides in with huge containers secured to their bicycles and unload their consignments. The auctions take place as soon as the auctioneers’ assistants sort fish by variety and size amidst loud shouting for competing prices. Riding through specific routes within the city, more cyclists arrive with similar containers to buy fish to either sell in city markets or in designated localities. Since fish is a staple across class divisions, it is especially valued when purchased fresh and alive, and makes for heavy cargo as vendors are required to fill their aluminum containers with water. Unlike other cycle workers who depend upon wage labour, Kolkata’s fish traders mine value out of the commodity itself while their capacity to move with heavy goods on cheap bicycles also keeps their profits high.

The city’s fish auctions support diverse economic activities. These range from the operation of markets with rents and revenues for shops and stalls, alongside bribes for makeshift stalls that auctioneers use and to local police stations for the smooth passage of consignments. The location of the auctions and the relative absence of motor traffic at dawn enable cargo-cyclists to ride long distances with heavy containers. From dawn until noon, auctions until final sales, fish vendors are engaged in negotiations and bargaining with customers from all over the city. By noon, they pack their stalls and cycle home close to the pavement so that they are not in harm’s way of speeding buses and auto-rickshaws (Figures 1 and Figure 2).

Figure 1. Cargo-cycles parked near a fish auction. Kolkata 2015. Photograph © Malini Sur.

Figure 2. Vendor cyclists gather at dawn for newspaper collection and distribution. Kolkata 2016 © Malini Sur.

Figure 3. Chained on-street parking spaces informally reserved by residents, Delhi 2015 Photograph: © Manas Murthy.

Figure 4. Ride along organised by Aapki Sadak team attended by residents of adjacent informal settlements, Delhi 2015 Photograph: © Manas Murthy.

In addition to the fish traders who ride from the city’s eastern wetlands and southern fringes throughout the city; vendors transport heavy packages of fresh cream used for making sweets and cooking gas crisscrossing the city. Unlike cyclists engaged in fish trade, these transporters of essential goods are either daily wage labourers or earn a nominal monthly wage. The smooth functioning of established sweet shops, restaurants and licensed service providers and consumers depends upon the mobility of vendor cyclists. Repair and maintenance economies also flourish as these bicycles require regular maintenance for the heavy goods that they carry. Since the costs of repair and maintenance is low, bicycles continue to ply on the city’s streets as a viable option for urban mobility (Sur 2020a). Unlike European and American freight bicycles that are manufactured with standardized extensions and additional wheels which minimize demands on the body, Kolkata’s cargo-cycles come into being with cheap ordinary objects to generate assemblages. The use of iron carriers, pegs, coir, elastic, wood and plastic extensions and other cheaply available materials assist vendors to secure heavy goods (Sur 2020a) while making laborious demands on their bodies.  

Kolkata’s cargo-cyclists, who move and trade in essential goods and services, are forced to negotiate with infrastructures unsuited to cycling. Infrastructures designed for segregating modes of travel often pose impediments to the mobility of cyclists, compelling them to find ways to adapt and repurpose these. Every morning, vendors carefully balance heavy gas cylinders weighing 31 kilograms each on a bridge across the Beleghata-Kestopur canal situated in central Kolkata.³ Although historically an important creek, today it is a mass of stagnant drainage water over which the pedestrian bridge stands. The bridge connects lower middle-class localities and settlements with middle class and affluent residential areas that require these goods and services. Gas vendors walk up the stairs carrying their bicycles and park them on the bridge. Then, turning their head to one side, they carefully balance a gas cylinder on their shoulders and climb up the bridge again. They repeat this motion until they have placed all gas cylinders on the bridge. Standing amidst office goers, school students, and women domestic workers who also lift their cycles to carry them on the stairs leading to the bridge, the vendors stoop to carefully tie all the gas cylinders to their bicycle. A black elastic chord—often the inner tube of a bicycle tyre—secures the cylinders to either side of the rear wheel in addition to one on the carrier. Straddling their bicycles and looking behind to check if the cargo is securely fastened, they pedal away. Here, transport planning’s focus on segregation of modes of transport in terms of pedestrians, motorized, and non-motorised, make infrastructures rigid. Although with minor and cheap adaptions these may easily facilitate the passage of cyclists; urban governance discounts infrastructural adaptations.

Vendor cyclists drive city economies with great risks. Their bodies and cargo are made more precarious by urban planning that seeks to segregate modes of transport and land uses within the city in the name of good governance. In addition to the hardships of cycling through a segregated city with larger distances between single-use zones, cargo-cyclists must also negotiate with the increasing sterilization of designed road space. Although in several low-and-middle income countries like India, cities may be relatively less car-dependent along with low ownership of cars, transport policies nevertheless privilege cars resulting in higher traffic risks (Goel et al. 2022, 77–78). This disjuncture between urban policies and the priorities in practice in relationship to the actual modal share and travel profile is also evident in road accidents. Road accident statistics from various studies and reports (Ministry of Road Transport and Highways 2022; Panda, Dash, and Dash 2022; Tiwari et al. 2008) identify over-speeding as a significant cause for fatalities, where cyclists are particularly vulnerable. The focus on high-speed road design, including specific factors like ‘straight roads’ and ‘open areas’ (Ministry of Road Transport and Highways 2022, 2) has further endangered slow-moving vehicles. Largely a result of the pervasive bias against slow-moving vehicles within urban and transport planning, new design of roads tends to privilege ‘efficient, high-speed corridors’, via projects of road widening, segregation of lanes based on speed, and an increasing emphasis on mass transit corridors. Road accident statistics, however, do not deter transport planning in practice from focusing on movement flow, and exercising a bias against slow-moving vehicles in particular. Illicit car parking on roadsides and pavements in Kolkata which prevents cyclists from riding to the side of the road also pushes them into traffic lanes with speeding buses and auto-rickshaws, endangering their bicycles, goods, and lives.

Cycle rickshaws and bicycles are ubiquitous in Old Delhi, where the narrow and winding streets and high intensity slow-moving traffic are most conducive to these modes of transport for both goods and people. Sanjay Gupta, for instance, emphasizes the important role played by NMT modes such as cycle rickshaws, in distributing goods in wholesale markets within and outside Old Delhi (Gupta 2017, 978). However, the role of cycle rickshaws is not restricted to the old city. Their presence is felt everywhere in Delhi; from neighbourhood street corners to major transit hubs, cycle rickshaws are a critical form of last mile connectivity, cutting across class and geography of the city. Cycle rickshaws as an employment sector and transport mode are growing despite the move towards greater segregation of modes and increased travel distances (Sood 2012). The predicament of cycle rickshaw pullers, predominantly migrant workers, may be attributed to the Delhi Cycle Rickshaw Byelaws of 1960, with a special focus on the so-called ‘owner-plier’ policy’ (Sood 2012, 95). The policy stipulates that all rickshaw pullers must own their vehicles, which is a very costly proposition for those who ply cycle rickshaws for a living. Besides affordability, migrant rickshaw pullers do not wish to own their vehicles, as they must return to their villages every year as marginal farmers. Often local authorities and law enforcement exploit and arm-twist rickshaw pullers and organised fleet operators extracting bribes and illegal rent from them to keep the system running. As a result, many rickshaw pullers remain caught up in informal contractual arrangements with low-level transport operators that own and manage entire fleets. Despite this, the high demand for local IPT solutions for short trips from the residents of the city, and a policy-level push towards NMT for last mile connectivity, there is little incentive for the system to do away with informal contractual arrangements and illicit practices.

The advent of modern planning in Indian cities and attempts to segregate mixed-use high-density areas in cities like Delhi have led to the gradual marginalisation of cycle rickshaws from major city roads and neighbourhoods. In Delhi, the spatial segregation of employment centers from residential neighborhoods and the establishment of an automobile-oriented culture started with the introduction of new residential neighbourhoods, based on Clarence Perry’s conception of the ideal neighbourhood unit (Tiesdell and Carmona 2007; Vidyarthi 2010). This led to the migration and settlement of the ‘middle-class’⁴ from the traditionally dense and mixed-use neighbourhoods of Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi), to the new, low density, residential-use neighbourhoods that were planned further away from each other in a ‘centrifugal residential growth pattern’ (Dupont, Tarlo, and Vital 2000, 231). This new form of urban planning segregated land uses and organized housing away from employment and commercial centres. Unlike the USA, however, where such neighbourhoods were conceived within an increasingly automobile-oriented society, post-independence India did not have nearly the same levels of per capita automobile ownership. The gap between planned expectations and actual levels of automobile ownership in Delhi continued to be met for a significant period after independence by other modes of commute, notably the bicycle. Post-independence planning also involved large swathes of the hinterland to be incorporated into the city’s expansion plan (Collings-Wells 2020; Hull 2011), which increased commute distances and changed the character of neighbourhoods from dense, mixed-use localities to mono-functional residential precincts sterilized of informal activities that sustained informal commerce and networks.

Newly planned neighbourhoods designed for the refugee population, such as Malviya Nagar in South Delhi, were a far cry from the dense streets of Old Delhi that fostered informal commerce and industrial workshops. Though equipped with social infrastructure such as schools, parks and community centres and some local shopping, these new neighbourhoods lacked spaces for corner shops, ground floor workshops, and other opportunities for informal occupation of street space. As a result, mixed-use streets that were previously an essential site for ‘the maintenance of everyday machines in India’ (Arnold 2013, 101), as well as ‘sites for disseminating the technical expertise needed to repair and maintain bicycles’ (Arnold and DeWald 2011, 979) and other everyday technologies, were absent. With the adoption of modern neighbourhood planning at a large scale, the 'pre-modern’ areas of Delhi that previously constituted an entanglement of informal labour practices, localization of (colonial) technologies, residential and commercial uses, elite and working classes, came to be increasingly diminished.

In Delhi the construction of high-speed corridors for the movement of automobiles, coupled with the post-independence planning of plotted neighbourhoods, has resulted in the incentivization of an automobile culture. Car ownership among the middle-class has skyrocketed and neighbourhoods have grown ever denser. Neighbourhood streets, though planned for automobile use, lack sidewalks and designated parking spaces, leading to the overwhelming occupation of street space by on-street parking. Ironically then, personal automobiles, a symbol of freedom and efficient high-speed mobility, have contributed towards the immobility of neighbourhood residents, who must in turn rely on the cycle rickshaw for local mobility.

Negotiating space, state agents and civil society

In Delhi, transport policy and urban development have sought to prioritise mass transit and big infrastructure over small-scale neighbourhood-oriented interventions that reconnect residents with low carbon modes of travel. This was the experience of the Aapki Sadak team in Delhi, where there was significant pushback from the South Delhi Municipal Corporation in implementing small-scale changes to proposed neighbourhood improvements. Strategic reports such as the Planning and Design for Sustainable Urban Mobility Report by UN-HABITAT, which recognize the forces at play in pushing a motor vehicle driven agenda and the persistent bias in transport policy and infrastructure development (UN-Habitat 2013), have also demonstrated this. At the scale of the city, new travel patterns have emerged, centralizing the movement of people and goods along arterial routes. Though public bus operators service a larger area of the city, new plans for the Metro System (Metro) and the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) focus infrastructure development along specific corridors or arterials. One of the major impacts of such development has been an intense demand for travel modes to and from mass transit stations. This travel behaviour, referred to as first/last mile connectivity, is heavily reliant on technologies such as the cycle rickshaw and other IPT vehicles that are usually non-motorised and cycle-powered. Hence, despite the emphasis on big infrastructures that segregate modes of transport based on either speed or mass movement, the dependence on cycle rickshaws and other informal modes of IPT for last mile travel, continues to increase.

Residents’ Welfare Associations (RWAs) of middle-class neighbourhoods in Delhi often ban cycle rickshaws from entering their gated enclaves, citing cases of unwanted anti-social activity and damage to parked vehicles⁵, illustrating their duplicitous relationship with cycling and cycle workers. These arrangements keep fluctuating, however, as most residents still rely on the convenience of using cycle rickshaws for short trips around the neighbourhood and to public transit stops. This practice of extra-legal policing and fortification of neighbourhoods within gated communities (Baviskar 2020) extends beyond cycle rickshaws to include handcarts and other slow-moving vehicles associated with the urban poor. This association of cycling and its attendant technologies with the urban poor produces pervasive bias amongst the middle class in Delhi. For instance, residents opposed suggestions for designing dedicated cycle tracks during the Aapki Sadak project, especially if these came at the cost of on-street parking space. The overwhelming perception of residents was that cycling is meant for kids, recreation and fitness, and an activity done best in open parks and spaces. While most residents agreed that cycling and NMT have environmental benefits, they emphasized their inability to cycle due to the absence of road space and accessibility, as well as the inhospitable air quality and weather of Delhi. Most residents scarcely used cycles for commuting, running errands, accessing public transit stations, or even visiting the local market or temple. Increasingly, street space has become congested with vehicles, either parked or in motion, reducing space available for walking or cycling. This has further reinforced residents’ perceptions that even internal neighbourhood streets are no longer conducive to cycling.

During a cycling event organized by Aapki Sadak, meant to encourage residents to re-engage with their streets as cyclists, it was nearly impossible to recruit adult volunteers from among middle-class residents, many of whom complained that they did not have cycles to begin with. Despite offering to facilitate free cycles for the event, most declined, while residents from the adjacent informal settlements joined in spontaneously in far greater numbers. The informal, and indeed illegal, occupation of neighbourhood street space by cars has trapped middle-class residents in a vicious cycle that fosters the growth of cars, and alienates the cycle from their daily lives, travel behaviour, and street space. Ironically, at the level of the street, interactions between cycle workers and those who oversee the policing of streets mainly take place between actors who share a similar socio-economic background. For instance, ‘banning’ cycle rickshaws from middle class neighbourhoods is practically enforced on streets by security guards employed by RWAs through seasonal, low-wage contracts. Here the bodies of informal workers are mobilized against each other, and spatial politics is enacted once again through its entanglements with informal practices on an everyday basis.

With this emphatic statement—‘the road is not ours’—Ramesh, a migrant from Bihar who plies fresh cream, conveyed how difficult it was for vendor cyclists like him to cycle in Kolkata. The city’s traffic regulations have variably prohibited and restricted cycling on anywhere between 38 and 100 city roads since 2008 until 2022. Categorizing bicycles as slow-moving vehicles that create traffic snarls, the traffic police and local police stations prohibit bicycles from key streets placing these vehicles outside the flow of traffic, ironically in a country that is among the world’s fifth largest manufacturers of bicycles (Sur 2017). Ramesh needs to travel from the northern parts of the city where the milk market is located to the southern parts, delivering fresh cream to sweet shops across the city. On most days, traffic police allow cargo-cyclists to ride through streets that have ‘no cycling signs’, occasionally demanding money for tea and snacks. These negotiations and understandings which include bribing are widespread in India and constitute channels that materialize citizenship, markets and the state in specific ways (Baviskar 2020; Fuller and Benei 2001; Srivastava 2014). Yet, when suddenly the city police prevent cyclists from accessing key roads without which they cannot reach markets, and impose informal and unjust penalties, Ramesh and his co-workers must forego their daily earnings. In addition, they incur monetary losses as the police confiscate their bicycles. Even while implementing these regulations the state exhibits informality, as the police either arbitrarily implement these rules, or worse, impose ad hoc fines to extract illegal rent.

The police typically fine cyclists by handing out a traffic violation ticket or ‘challan.’ Essentially these are blank chits of paper, often just a little bigger than a small postage stamp. Some have a blue or purple circular seal stamped on them with the words ‘Traffic Guard’ and ‘Kolkata Police’ encircling the Ashoka lion pillar, India’s national emblem, lending the fake papers an aura of legitimacy. Other penalty slips are scribbles and signatures on plain paper. Some mention the word bicycle, others do not. Such official penalties impair riders’ livelihoods that depend upon cycling. When cyclists refuse to accept the ‘challan’, they are served formal court orders and the police confiscate their bicycles. Negotiating these formal procedures, cyclists are forced to bear the cost of significant delays and are unable to deliver goods in a timely manner, impacting their livelihoods. Unlike employers of wageworkers that own fleets of non-motorised cargo vehicles, such as pushcarts and cycle rickshaws, who regularly bribe local police stations to ensure the smooth traffic of goods, the city’s cargo-cyclists are left to their own means—whether they are employed by others or in charge of their own business.

Often Kolkata’s cargo-cyclists are compelled to adopt extreme strategies to evade traffic constables and circumvent regulations and penalties. For instance, a senior cyclist recalled how during peak traffic hours and right below the traffic surveillance camera, he gently placed his bicycle with heavy goods as soon as a police constable approached him with a penalty slip. By blocking the intersection and negotiating with police he further impeded traffic flow. This led the flustered constable to release him, asking him to make a quick exit despite the violations he had committed (Sur 2020b). In other instances, cargo-cyclists are forced to give bribes for passage. Although illicit practices in cities enable ordinary people to gain access to necessities, earn a livelihood, and even build a sense of community (Srivastava 2014; Anjaria 2016; Sur 2021b), in this instance they force cyclists to be dependent on the whims of the traffic police.

Another strategy that Kolkata’s cargo-cyclists develop is the use of informal word-of-mouth networks around tea stalls, marketplaces, and repair shops to keep ahead of the information curve about where police are imposing fines and news of alternative routes. Such forms of communicative networks, as Julia Elyachar (2010) foregrounds, are laden with deep symbolic meanings to generate economic value in cities. Drawing on Malinowski’s emphasis on the centrality of gossip in social life and Marx’s theorizing of labour power to produce value in capitalism, Elyachar shows how such forms of gendered sociality generate ‘social infrastructures’ to produce what she calls ‘phatic labour.’ These she argues are fundamental to economic projects including the production of surplus in ways that recast dominant understandings of women’s empowerment in microcredit projects in Cairo as an end in itself (Elyachar 2010, 457–458). In the instance of Kolkata’s cycle workers, the gendering of space and value operates through the mostly male and migrant workers for whom the capacity to ride through the city is fundamental to their role as primary earners and remitters of money. The exchange of information leads them to either walk on the pavements with goods or seek alternative routes in ways that prevent penalties and monetary losses. Furthermore, these manoeuvres are critical for moving through the city with goods and determine their value. Especially since perishability is a feature of commodities like fresh cream; delays in deliveries transmute valuable goods into waste. Elyachar’s analysis also recalls important insights in the anthropology of infrastructures as socio-technical assemblages that gather urban networks (Anand 2017; Bjorkman 2015), as critical entities that create agents of circulation (Sopranzetti 2017, 65–72), and ‘people as infrastructures’ based on their economic contributions (Simone 2004). The provisional and flexible activities of ordinary and mobile city dwellers produce cities in an infrastructural sense; their negotiations and resistances make cities sustainable (Simone 2004; Anand 2017, 3; Sur 2020a). Such networks of dense sociality and support are preconditions of urbanity and are evident among homeless and marginalized cyclists whose lives and livelihoods are supported by ‘underground bike economies’ (Steinmann and Wilson 2022; Parker 2019). Here, the work done by cyclists supports recycling and associated informal economies through enduring relationships that are cemented in bike shops, repair hubs and markets (Steinmann and Wilson 2022; Parker 2019; Sur 2020a).

As a response to traffic policies that marginalise cycling, Kolkata’s cycling activists have called attention to the bicycle as a cheap and environmentally friendly solution to rising air pollution and have mobilised cyclists in their demand for road use and equity (Sur 2020b). Discussions on equitable access to roads have gathered momentum in NGO offices, citizen’s platforms and at public gatherings on busy traffic intersections. Activists have filed a public interest litigation to redress the inequities on the city’s roads (Sur 2017). Kolkata’s annual bicycle rally generates awareness on the importance of NMT in reducing carbon emissions vis-à-vis Kolkata’s rising air pollution (Sur 2020b). Unlike the case of Delhi, where middle-class attitudes towards cycling remain elitist, Kolkata’s cycling activism has managed to form productive alliances with cycle workers and labour organizations, effectively framing the demands of the movement in a different light. Here, the immobility and marginalisation of cyclists from road space progresses alongside a growing mobilisation and consciousness of cyclists as a unified demographic.

Meanwhile, in Delhi, and at the national policy level, there has been sustained advocacy by several civil society organisations towards sustainable mobility in general and NMT modes in particular. Any attention brought to this field over the recent past has been mainly through the active politicisation of such agendas through the news, seminars, conferences, and publications on road safety, urban pollution, and sustainable mobility. Much of this advocacy has been led by a dedicated circle of organisations and individuals including, most significantly, The Transport Research and Injury Prevention Programme (TRIPP)⁶ at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, the Centre for Science & Environment (CSE)⁷, Clean Air Asia⁸, Centre for Green Mobility⁹, and EMBARQ¹⁰. Sustainable transport research coming out of Delhi’s civil society has acknowledged the positive impact of NMT for its contribution to affordability, accessibility and environmental benefits (Tiwari, Jain, and Ramachandra Rao 2016). Similarly, studies done by transport researchers at TRIPP (Tiwari et al. 1998) have consistently argued for a serious transformation of road designs to prioritise the movement of NMT, the safety of pedestrians and cyclists, and the acknowledgement of mixed traffic flows in the Indian context. Such sustained advocacy by the intellectual elite in Delhi, is however, countered by the attitudes of the middle-class residents of the city.

Conclusion

In this article, we have shown how cycling work underscores the dense and conflicting relationships between urban economies, state planning, and the regulation of space. Cycle workers continually negotiate the unevenness of state regulations, infrastructures, and the logistics of mass transport and automobility that shape their access to the city. Our engagement with the productive contributions that cyclists make to the urban economies pushed scholarly understandings on informality across the spheres of markets and states, bringing them into productive dialogue with urban space and everyday mobility. Cycling work gathers the modalities through which cities are regulated. Such forms of regulation unfold through competing struggles over roads, markets and neighbourhoods, and generate conditions of dependency and conflict across social classes.

Despite overt calls for cleansing elite enclaves and restrictions on informal markets and roads, city dwellers continue to depend on vendor cyclists and cycle rickshaws. Their simultaneous dependency on cycle workers for essential goods and cheap services exists alongside the stigma that intrinsically associates these vehicles with the urban poor. Further, while acknowledging the merits of bicycles as environmentally friendly, the same extension of environmental consciousness on the part of civil society and NGO’s does not extend to cycle rickshaws. By imposing gradations on cycling, and yet instrumentalizing cycle work, city dwellers continue to mine value out of the everyday mobility of workers while the workers themselves, whether profit making traders and union supported rickshaw pullers or nominal wage-earning cyclists, continue to operate from the margins of economies, urban space, and safety. Road space and neighbourhoods in Kolkata and Delhi are increasingly fraught with contestations which render fragile the ecosystems, economies, and infrastructures that rely on cycle work. Despite such fragility and the precarity of cycling workers, even large scale and formally planned mass transit systems are dependent on cycle rickshaws for much needed last mile connectivity to transit hubs, and goods supply chains on cargo-cyclists. In the face of state negligence and harassment, India’s cycle workers are compelled to negotiate road space in their everyday lives on their own terms, and with costs and risks to their bodies and lives.

While India’s National Urban Transport Policy (2014) seeks to foster cycling and its adoption in transport planning, and sustainable transport research hails cycling for its environmental and economic benefits, other venues within the current transport planning regime continue to marginalise cycling. At the level of last mile governance and traffic regulation, Kolkata shows us how informal and arbitrary rules can render cyclists immobile. Delhi on the other hand shows us that mass transit systems continue to foster informal IPT operators and the cycle rickshaw, even as the focus of new development remains firmly directed towards arterial roads and high-speed transport planning. The middle-class in Delhi have relegated cycling to the domain of recreation, and constantly push towards the expulsion of cycle rickshaws from neighbourhoods, even though they are increasingly dependent on such technologies in the face of increasing congestion and vehicular occupation of their road space.

The proliferation of private vehicles and automobility have not led to the faster movement of people across Indian cities instead, they have resulted in increasing congestion and contestation over roads and neighbourhood streets. Mass transit solutions that seek to centralize public transport access and increase efficiency through the movement of higher passenger volumes, continue to foster informal forms of first/last mile connectivity that are enabled through, and co-exist alongside, NMT technologies. And even as RWAs continue to adopt informal/extra-legal ways to securitize and sterilize neighbourhoods from cycle rickshaws, handcarts and the like, city dwellers cannot do without these essential goods and services. With the move towards gig economies and new waves of food delivery cyclists in India as well the restrictions on mass public transport during the Covid pandemic, state planning cannot continue to neglect and make cycle workers invisible. In the case of cycling for livelihoods, efforts to change the public perception and image of cargo-cyclists and cycle rickshaw pullers must not only retrieve dignity for the millions of cyclists but also be a morally grounded movement for affordable mobility and low carbon, sustainable transport futures.

Acknowledgements

We thank Julie Cidell, George Jose, Eli Elinoff, Tim Heffernan, Pennie Drinkall and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments on an earlier draft. Malini thanks Ekta Kothari Jaju, Raghu Jana and Shamik Sarkar and Kolkata’s cargo-cyclists. Her research was funded by the Vice Chancellor’s Women’s Fellowship at Western Sydney University and the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Manas is very grateful to the Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation and the Aapki Sadak team for giving him the opportunity to closely observe the everyday drama and politics between municipal officials, neighbourhood RWAs and residents, informal workers, and cyclists, on the streets of Delhi’s so-called planned colonies. He also thanks the sustainable transportation and parking experts he has learnt from between 2012 and 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Malini’s documentary film on bicycling cultures in India ‘Life Cycle’ is freely available for teaching and screening here: http://malinisur.com/

2 The aim of the project was to devise a series of practical solutions for improved pedestrian and NMT accessibility within the precinct, through rigorous community engagement, detailed mapping surveys, and technical design support.Led by Ashok B. Lall Architects, other firms involved were Innovative Transport Solutions (iTrans), Oasis Design Incorporated, Sandeep Gandhi Architects, Aastha Chauhan, and Mriganka Saxena (HTAU), and was supported by Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation. Details of the project may be found here: https://shaktifoundation.in/report/reclaim-urban-neighbourhood/

3 Malini thanks Raghu Jana for alerting her to this site.

4 While deploying the term middle-class throughout this article, the authors are aware that the statistical limits of the term describe a different class of people in a developing country such as India, with relatively lower per capita household income. Yet, while describing themselves, most participants in Delhi continued to adhere to this category. It has come to signify the upwardly mobile class of people that own property within the inner-city neighbourhoods of Delhi and may, realistically, be considered the urban elite. Income disparities have since only widened as is reflected in this recent article: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/income-of-poorest-fifth-plunged-53-in-5-yrs-those-at-top-surged-7738426/

5 This refers to claims made by residents that the locknut / pin at the centre of cycle rickshaw wheels stick out and at that height scratch the doors of parked vehicles on side of the road in congested neighbourhoods.

6 The Transport Research and Injury Prevention Programme (TRIPP) at IIT is an interdisciplinary programme focussing on the reduction of adverse health effects of road transport. Refer http://tripp.iitd.ernet.in/

7 The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) is a public interest research and advocacy organisation based in New Delhi. CSE researches, lobbies for, and communicates, the urgency of development that is both sustainable and equitable. For further details, refer, http://www.cseindia.org/node/214

8 Clean Air Asia was established in 2001 as the premier air quality network for Asia by the Asian Development Bank, World Bank, and USAID. For further details, refer, http://cleanairinitiative.org/portal/aboutus

9 CGM is a team of individuals with core competency in urban planning, transportation, urban design, and communications, who provide support to entities with the aim of creating/building liveable cities for all. Refer http://www.cgm.org.in/index.php#

10 EMBARQ is a multi-national advocacy organisation which looks towards the mobilisation of governments and communities on issues of sustainable mobility and has helped frame national policies, conduct relevant studies and foster local initiatives to this effect and is a not-for-profit initiative of the World Resources Institute (WRI), an environmental think tank in Washington, D.C. Refer http://embarqindia.org/about