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GUWAHATI, May 9, 2026 — The cycle rickshaw is still the cheapest way to cross a crowded bazaar in Guwahati. It needs no fuel, no traffic app and no license for the passenger. But the people who pull these three-wheeled carriages are watching their livelihood vanish as the city upgrades its streets.
At Paltan Bazaar, one of the busiest trade hubs in Assam's capital, a row of empty rickshaws sits under the afternoon sun. The wait, which used to be a few minutes, now stretches into an hour. People who once haggled over a fare now summon a car on their phones or board an electric bus. The result is a daily struggle for thousands of informal workers whose place in the future of Guwahati has been left undefined.
Most of the city's rickshaw pullers are migrants from other states. Many have lived in Guwahati for 20 or 30 years. They rent their rickshaws from owners by the day, often paying Rs 80 or Rs 100 before collecting a single passenger. The fare for a regular short trip has stayed around Rs 30 to Rs 40 while the prices of rice, vegetables and the tarpaulin sheets used in a rickshaw canopy have climbed sharply.
"Earlier the same trip would bring enough money to eat well at night. Now a passenger tells me to keep the change only if the fare is small," said Mohan, a 56-year-old puller who has worked around Fancy Bazaar since the late 1990s. He asked that his full name not be used because the trade operates largely outside official rules.
Guwahati has not ignored its rickshaw pullers. They appear in government planning documents as "intermediate" transport, a category that places them below buses and taxis in priority. The city has also held registration drives at different times. But there is no reliable count of how many active pullers remain, no social security program for aging drivers, and no clear policy for what should happen to them when the metro rail arrives.
The city's transport system is changing on several fronts at once. A long-promised metro rail project is moving from paper to field. The city bus network has been rebuilt around cleaner, more regulated electric buses. App-based cab and bike taxi services have arrived in every neighborhood. New flyovers and one-way streets push traffic away from older bazaar areas or make them harder for rickshaws to reach.
None of these developments is designed to remove cycle rickshaws. But together they have reduced the short-distance trips that once sustained this workforce. Rickshaws are also banned from several major roads during peak hours. Municipal drives against roadside parking often push their stands to the back of bus depots and under flyovers, where fewer passengers look for them.
A senior member of a local rickshaw welfare group said the problem is not that pullers dislike change. It is that the city treats them as a temporary mistake.
"They ask us to make cycle rickshaws disappear, but no one says where 10,000 families should go. If the state wants modern transport, it must modernize the conversation about labor," he said.
Urban researchers who study informal transport say the cycle rickshaw is an asset for any climate-friendly city. It is quiet, free of tailpipe emissions and can move through lanes too narrow for buses. What it lacks is a place in the official mobility hierarchy. Few new road projects include rickshaw stands; bus schedules are not coordinated with rickshaw routes; metro station designs have no obvious space for cycle rickshaw holding areas.
The International Labour Organization has warned for years that India's informal workers face the highest risk from economic change because they lack contractual protection. Rickshaw pullers fit that category with brutal precision.
Some pullers have already tried to adapt. A few have shifted to e-rickshaws, especially around the railway station, where heavier loads and longer distances earn better money. But an e-rickshaw costs several times a month's income, and charging it still needs a place to plug in. The older generation cannot start over.
"After a certain age, the legs give up. No driver training class will hire a man who cannot read a meter or stand for eight hours," said Ramesh, another puller. "We are not asking to be lifted out of poverty. We are asking to be counted before the roads close."
For a city that wants to be smart, cycle rickshaws can be part of the answer. The metro cannot give door-to-door rides; buses cannot enter every bylane; walking is not easy in the rainy season. A puller can provide exactly the last-mile connection that urban planners say is missing. The question is whether the city is prepared to build its modernization around people, rather than only around engineering.
A fair plan would start with fixed fares for identified routes and licensed rickshaw stands outside metro stations. It would give pullers first claim on e-rickshaw loans. It would treat cycle rickshaws and motorized vehicles as complementary parts of a single network, not rivals.
None of that is expensive or exotic. It requires only that the people running the city stop seeing rickshaw pullers as a symbol of backwardness.
The city is ready to change. Are its plans ready for the people who have kept it moving for decades?
