Pulling rickshaws: a way out of poverty?

In Bangladesh rickshaw pulling offers a time-limited opportunity for very poor people to improve their lives. Rickshaw pullers often get sick and as they get older this way of life becomes increasingly unsustainable. Their children receive only limited schooling and grow up with few occupational choices and opportunities to escape poverty.

A study from the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies looks at the lives of rickshaw pullers in Dhaka. The authors argue for interventions to assist rickshaw pullers and their families to cope with crises caused by ill health and accidents and to access educational and training opportunities.

Between one and two percent of the Bangladeshi workforce are in the rickshaw trade. Moving a rickshaw through the crowded streets of Dhaka requires – from people whose lives have been shaped by poverty and malnutrition – the stamina and energy levels of a strong athlete.

Interviews with 500 current and former pullers indicated that those who pull rickshaws for a long time eventually have to abandon the job due to ill-health or reduced physical stamina, or end up working part time. The average period the rickshaw pullers continue working full time is around ten years – although one in seven manage to keep going for over twenty years. A major illness can wipe out two years of savings.

The research also found that:

• The average age of a rickshaw puller in Dhaka is 38.
• Most come from deprived rural backgrounds: 25 percent have finished primary school, 62 percent have no cultivable land, while another 22 percent have less than 0.5 decimal of cultivatable land.
• More than half have no savings, a fifth are too poor to have three meals a day, over half have not been able to acquire any assets and half are in debt.
• At the time of the survey about 22 percent of long duration pullers were unwell, compared to two percent of recent joiners.
• Child mortality rates are high and school attendance rates low in rickshaw pullers’ households.

For poor people without land, rickshaw pulling offers more prospects than being an agricultural labourer but is an occupation which causes immense human suffering and perpetuates poverty. However, if savings and asset accumulation of rickshaw pullers could be raised while they are still at the peak of their energy then rickshaw pulling as a longer-term escape from poverty could become a more realistic prospect.

The study calls on policymakers to:

• encourage men to leave the rickshaw pulling business at a relatively early stage of involvement while they are still fit enough to take up other occupations
• build on the fact that many recent entrants to the trade are relatively well educated compared to older colleagues
• improve access to flexible credit and basic health insurance
• ensure greater enforcement of road safety regulations
• improve public emergency healthcare and make primary healthcare more widely available in deprived urban neighbourhoods
• hold back from prohibitions or restrictions until support programmes for rickshaw pullers and their families are in place.

Source(s):
‘Unsustainable livelihoods, health shocks and urban chronic poverty: Rickshaw pullers as a case study’, Programme for Research on Chronic Poverty in Bangladesh, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, by Sharifa Begum and Binayak Sen, November 2004 Full document.

Funded by: World Health Organisation

id21 Research Highlight: 17 August 2005

Further Information:
Sharifa Begum and Binayak Sen
Programme for Research on Chronic Poverty in Bangladesh
Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies
E-17 Agargaon
Sher-e-Bangla Nagar
Dhaka-1207, Bangladesh

Tel: +880 2 9117829
Fax: +880 2 8113023
Contact the contributor: sharifa@sdnbd.org; bsen@bdonline.com

Programme for Research on Chronic Poverty, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies

Other related links:
'Chronic Poverty in Bangladesh'

'Bangladesh: poverty pushes millions into child labour'