Life without auto rickshaws
There was a time when Bombay's suburbs did not have rickshaws. I wonder if their introduction was actually a good thing.
Many suburban Bombayites have a love-hate relationship with auto rickshaws, the humble three-wheelers that are called “tuk tuks” in Thailand and elsewhere. They’re a cheap and convenient way to get around the poorly-planned suburbs of this city, but many auto drivers are absolutely reckless on the roads. There’s also a joke that autos are like policemen. They’re available in abundance when no one needs them, but hard to find when someone has to absolutely urgently get somewhere.
I personally like the auto drivers here, with the exception of the good-for-nothings that hang around the two airport terminals or railway stations like the Bandra terminus or the Tilak Nagar Terminus in Kurla. Auto drivers, as a rule, use their meters and don’t make unreasonable demands- something that their counterparts in Chennai, Bangalore or Hyderabad have made an art form of. Of course, there are some auto drivers here who try and cheat my foreign friends, and others who just refuse to go to a particular place without any explanation.
How would life have been without auto rickshaws in Bombay’s suburbs? For the answer to that question, let’s go back to the time when these three-wheelers were not at our disposal.
In 1971 when my mother married my father and moved to Andheri from Hyderabad, she did not see any autos on the streets of this very neighbourhood we live in. When they went to visit family members in Goregaon, they would take a taxi. Now there are a few ways to go to Goregaon from Andheri but in the early 1970s, there was no Link Road. That entire stretch, now full of skyscrapers, dead and smelly creeks, shops and slums, was nothing but forests and swamps. My parents would have to travel on S.V. Road, which did not have much traffic at that time, crossing the (still-existing) buffalo sheds, old bungalows and Parsi baug in Jogeshwari to reach Goregaon. The journey in the early and mid-1970s did not take more than 20 minutes as there wasn’t much traffic on the road. In 1971, Bombay had a population of under 7 million, so this is understandable.
The arrival of auto rickshaws
Over the course of writing this post, I spoke to several long-term residents of Bombay to find out if they knew when autos first hit the roads of the suburbs. My mother doesn’t remember autos being there even in the late 1970s, but cannot pinpoint as to when they appeared here. The average middle class person could afford to take a taxi at that time and the buses were not as crowded as they are now.
My French teacher and close friend Mrs Perreira, who was every student’s favourite teacher at the Saint Theresa’s (Boys) High School in Khar, remembers taking autos as far back as 1976 (still before my lifetime). She lived in Juhu at that time, so autos did venture that far, it seems.
An 81-year old gentleman who lives in the top floor of my building says Andheri did not have autos till the early 1980s. The minimum bus fare in the 1970s from my neighbourhood to Andheri station was 10 paise, while a taxi ride cost 80 paise. Another neighbour in his 80s says autos appeared in Andheri after 1978, but he was also unsure of the exact year.
When auto rickshaws did find their way to Andheri, there weren’t too many takers, at least initially. Over the next few decades though, they kicked taxis out Andheri and to the southern end of the suburbs- Bandra.
The arrival of autos in Andheri West will forever be linked with a tragic event that took place in April 1982. On one afternoon that month, Aarti Bijur, a bright and intelligent 10-year old girl who had her whole life ahead of her, was walking home with joy since her summer vacations were approaching. The slightly plump girl with a bob cut had just left the Bharatiya Vidhya Bhavan’s A.H. Wadia High School on J.P. Road, when an auto rickshaw driver lost control of his vehicle and rammed it into the pavement. The bright little girl was hit and fell into a coma and died the next day. Her death traumatised an entire neighbourhood for a very long time.
What if…
Would the suburbs of Bombay have been more pleasant if they were planned better and had proper and clean sidewalks as well as broader roads? That is a rhetorical question, of course. Things could have been so different if the expansion of Bombay city limits was done in a more organised manner. Maybe these parts of the city would have been better off without autos. With proper sidewalks, people would have walked more and been healthier and with broader roads, maybe traffic would have been more ‘civilised.’
The writing is slowly appearing on the wall for autos. The more the metro network expands in the suburbs of contemporary Mumbai, the less the demand will be for autos. I, for one, would rather get somewhere quicker in a somewhat crowded metro train than get stuck in the traffic and inhale toxic fumes as my auto struggles to move ahead.
I am leaving the comments section open for anyone who can share their earliest memories of taking an auto in Bombay.
Autos may have existed in the late 1970s in Andheri and the rest of the suburbs of Mumbai but that was an era when the suburbs were less crowded as large areas of Mumbai had still not developed or reclaimed from forests or swamps. The public transport BEST buses were far more popular than autos, as not only were they way cheaper than autos but buses were less crowded (as compared to the last two decades). One would likely get a seat if you are traveling a longer distance across suburbs (than just to the nearest station). As the suburbs (including Andheri) got more crowded with more townships and residential buildings coming up, the buses were unable to cope up with the increased demand. The share-an-auto came up (generally from the nearest train station to or from specific residential or office locations) that drove up the popularity of autos as they would have a fixed fare and far cheaper than riding an auto for oneself to the desired destination.
From earliest memories when internet was not around, FM radio almost non-existent or limited to perhaps one state-run All India Radio local channel, CD players were not invented yet but it was the era of cassette players, the autos in Mumbai would go around playing the latest songs on audio cassette (either Marathi or Hindi language). Those songs would be the pulse of what the popular songs would be either locally/ in the state (Marathi language) and generally folklore / seasonal to a religious festival (whether of Hindus, Muslims or Christians) of the month or nationally (Hindi language) from Bollywood hit movies of the time, or patriotic songs closer to say Independence Day/Republic Day. Another memory: The honking by autos would occassionally startle you when they would be competing with each other or with pedestrians to move ahead on the narrow roads.