I have been riding with truckers all across Andhra Pradesh over the past week—Vijayawada, Rajahmundry, Visakhapatnam—and caught up with Rao near a forest check post at Tallapalem in Visakhapatnam district. A genial man with salt-and-pepper hair and bloodshot eyes, dressed in a dull khakhi uniform, he had set out from Guwahati four days ago with sixteen tonnes of bamboo. That explains why Rao stopped at the forest check-post; he has papers that certify the home-grown status of the bamboo, since forest bamboo is not permitted inter-state transit.
Freight traffic on the Guwahati–Vijayawada route (NH16) is considerable. Unlike in most other parts of southern India, it is common to spot many dhabas catering to Bengali and Assamese drivers here. A specimen called Ajay Bangla Dhaba soon passes us by. Rao, however, prepares food himself, mostly dal-chawal.
He has been travelling on this route for over twenty years, ever since he first helmed a truck. He reaches into his pockets for his driver’s license and hands it to me for a dekko. An unrecognisable, grimacing young man glowers at me. I look at Rao again and note in my diary that truckers are probably the only people in the country who look more personable in their license photos than in real life. The before-after effect is stark. Years of accumulated grime have funnelled into the dendritic crevices of his face. Sleep deprivation and exhaustion are a looming presence. Rao is in his late forties but appears to be a senior citizen.
But all this ‘experience’ has not entirely been in vain. A high school dropout, he has taught himself English by reading signboards over the years. He also claims to possess an uncanny ability of guessing the load a truck is carrying just by looking at the make of the truck and the shape of the load beneath the tarpaulin. ‘But it’s difficult to tell with the containers,’ he admits.
He, himself, usually transports eggs and fish from Andhra to Assam, which is surprising considering the supposed abundance of fish in the countless farm ponds that proliferate in the inundated lushness of Assam. I learn that Andhra Pradesh is the largest fish and shrimp producing state in all of India, much of it produced inland in sprawling commercial breeding centres. Curiously, fish is almost absent in the repertoire of dhaba dishes here, with the sole exception of Apollo fish: popcorn-sized fried boneless fish, an absolutely addictive dish that typically goes well with the hard stuff. Rao tells me that’s because much of the fish and shrimp produced here finds its way to the lucrative American and Korean markets; ‘export-quality’, as he calls it.
Rao himself doesn’t eat any fish. He’s a vegetarian. Hailing from the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, he was born in a ‘forward caste’ Kamma family and calls himself a Choudhari, the honorary title of erstwhile zamindars. ‘It feels good to say that I’m a Choudhari. It’s a prestigious name but what good is prestige without money in your pockets. The name Choudhari today is synonymous with deprivation,’ he laughs. Sucking on a Scissors cigarette, his fingers almost sticking into his nose, he launches into the story of his landowning family’s slide into relative poverty.
It all started when his grandfather, Koteswara Rao, took the bold decision of abandoning agriculture for trade in the 1970s. Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, Koteswara proceeded to sell most of his considerable land in his native village Maaredi Maata to shore up capital for a trading business in Eluru, the biggest town nearby. The business venture failed and soon vanished without a trace, leaving behind three sons, negligible land, and no viable means of employment. None of his sons had even passed matriculation so the formal sector was out of the question.
Left to fend for themselves, the three sons went their separate ways. While two of them found themselves subsisting in the stagnant waters of casual labour, the youngest son Prakash did well for himself by attaching himself as a driver to a prominent local road contractor, and learning to navigate the labyrinthine Public Works bureaucracy by greasing the right palms. Prakash amassed a lot of wealth in a decade and decided to deploy surplus capital into a truck. The 80s were heady days for the transport industry and trucking was perceived as a sunrise sector. Not only would it bring in a regular source of income but he would also be able to support his two elder brothers as drivers, without putting them through the indignity of charity.
Twenty years ago, the baton was passed on to Rao by his father. Today, Rao’s boss continues to be his uncle. ‘But he makes sure to not let business and family mix. He is a tough old taskmaster,’ says Rao. In fact, he refers to him as seth instead of chacha or its Telugu equivalent.
Working for his seth, Rao manages to earn around seventeen thousand rupees a month. His older son meanwhile does ‘maintenance work’ at a construction company in Dubai. ‘He manages to earn Rs 30-40 thousand a month, but the bosses are cruel, and the work is gruelling. Now every time we speak to him on the phone, he cries and says he wants to come back home.’
Not that Rao himself is particularly pleased with his own line of work. He has bouts of debilitating backache (during which his son takes over the wheel; the truck has to go on), his eyesight is getting worse, and he proudly claims to function on barely two hours of sleep while on a trip. Still, his biggest grouse is not this litany of ailments, which he recites with an aura of cheerful resignation. What makes him furious are the men in khakhi, the lurking RTO officials, the rot at the heart of the highway economy, the hoodlums in uniform lying in wait, the whole damned injustice of it.
On an average, Rao shells out a whopping Rs 5000 in bribes on a single trip from Vijayawada to Guwahati, a distance of around 2000 kilometres. His ordeal begins at the Icchapuram—yes the same one from the baarati dance number Aa Ante Amlapuram—on the Andhra– Odisha border. His pocket gets progressively lighter in Odisha at Khurda, Cuttack, Bhadrak and Balasore. And then comes the most dreaded part of the trip. Bangaal.
Both the roads and the police are the worst in Bengal, he says, his body shaking with exasperation. ‘The police there make up all sorts of excuses to extort money from us. Even if all your papers are in order, even if the paint has not dried on your truck, they won’t spare you. They will say you’re not wearing uniform, give us hundred. Why do you think I continue to wear this dusty uniform? They will say you don’t have a double driver, give us two hundred. You tell me, if there must be double drivers at all times, how will a khalassi ever train and get a license? These are the times, when government regulations, even if true, seem ludicrous.’
At this point, his face assumes an expression of indignant incredulity, shrouded behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘You won’t believe this but West Bengal police even have the gall to ask us for an authorization letter which proves we are driving the truck with the owner’s permission and knowledge. Now you tell me, in all-India will any motor maalik ever given an authorization letter. That’s just not how it’s done here. As if we don’t have to carry enough paperwork as it is,’ he says, rattling a large tin box containing a nest of papers.
Rao, who has been driving in Assam since the mid-90s, has had to deal with insurgent groups like the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) which held sway over many parts of Assam till over a decade back. Ununiformed cadre of the ULFA would demand a fixed rate of Rs 500 from truckers. You couldn’t even dream of haggling with them unless you want a bullet through your windshield. You had to give what they asked. This was before the government neutralized the ULFA around a decade back. But even the ULFA pales in comparison to the harassment meted out to truckers by the Bengal police, he claims.
He tells me an elaborate ecosystem of dalals (middlemen) has sprung up in West Bengal, to relieve the truckers’ misery and regularize this arbitrary extraction. Most drivers (excluding him, of course) have a ‘setting’ with dalals, wherein they message him their truck number three to four hours before they are due to arrive at an RTO check post. Upon receipt of the message, the dalal—who has connections with the local transport officials—ensures smooth passage of the truck without stoppage or bribe extraction. The cost of one ‘message’? Three hundred rupees, which was shared between the dalal
s and the officials.
‘This happens in Malda, Raiganj, Islampur, Siliguri and Jalpaiguri. But a bunch of shameless louts rule the roost in Cooch Behar and Alipur. The dalals there charge five hundred.’
But why even deal with the dalals when you can directly pay the officials? ‘If we don’t send the message to the dalal, the RTO officials may charge anything above Rs 1000 on all sorts of trumped up charges. That’s why bribes cost me so much,’ said Rao. So in effect, in order to circumvent the uncertainty and arbitrariness of police extortion, many truckers choose to settle for the lesser, or at least more consistent, evil. This is the real cost of logistics that you will not find in the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index. Humiliation, harassment, extortion.
But what aggrieves Rao even more is the notoriety truck drivers enjoy in society. He tells me it wasn’t always like this. In the 80s, when his father started driving trucks, the status of truckers was very different from what it is now. Without power steering, driving trucks was considered a relatively skilled, well-paid job, much like crane and forklift operators now. Villagers, largely cut off from the world, would welcome them as the harbingers of goods and news, treat them to tea, and even invite them into their homes.
‘Doctor ke barabar maante the (The status of truckers used to be equal to that of doctors). But now, even educated people say that drivers are not good people. He gets your maal over such long distances, after tolerating the blows of policemen. Why are drivers not good?’ he says. ‘If someone ever says to you that drivers are bad, you bring them to me. When he comes and stays with us for a few days, then I will ask him, why are we not good people?’
Talking to Rao, I can’t help but feel that the substantive role of the Indian state in its micro-economy seems to revolve around creating problems for some, so others can be employed in solving them. The government and the political masters have to be given credit for their perverse ingenuity. Genius, if you ask me, for they are the architects of these spidery patronage networks that radiate downwards from the summit of the political food chain.
Yes, that does seem to be twisted wisdom underlying the stubborn persistence of this corruption that permeates the Indian government and for that matter, our society. Across history, governments here have always been beholden to society, enveloped by it, moulded by it. The state derives its life force from the mass of people that mills around its meagre outposts, who discover that their stakes in the system—if any— must to be found in these patronage networks.
Why, for instance, do people continue to vote for politicians that they know to be corrupt? ‘Kyunki dalalon ka desh hai yeh (This is a nation of middlemen),’ Rao says. ‘And corruption is the real MNREGA of India.’
This culture of corruption is also granted implicit sanction by Hinduism, which permits a remarkable degree of amorality. As Pavan K. Varma writes in his book Being Indian, ‘It is the cheerful acceptance of a morally flexible world that saves Hindus from the dreariness of a soulless cynicism. Even in their worst actions they are never overwhelmed by their lack of morality, nor do they lose faith in their ultimate virtuosity; for after all, in an ephemeral and transient world, can anything ever be eternally right or wrong?’
The only teeny-weeny problem with this convenient arrangement between the rulers and the ruled? It is that while the politicians have adroitly outsourced their parallel tax collection to an army of middlemen, the sacrificial lambs in this coercive redistribution of wealth from the powerless to the powerful are invariably people like Rao, those subsisting on the margins of society. Truck drivers (and tribals), for instance are stereotyped as drunkards and good-for-nothings; their productive capacities disregarded, their voices hardly ever leaving their enclaves of deprivation. Rao’s gravelly voice simply wouldn’t carry outside his roomy cabin. All that can be heard by those outside is the menacing roar of his engine and a shrill, musically enabled honk that warns them to get the hell out of the way.
Rao himself claims to steer clear from this setting, this lafde ka kaam. But truckers elsewhere did not even pretend to have any such scruples. The existence of this messaging system was first revealed to me a week ago in Vijayawada at a truck lay-bye, a uniquely compassionate feature of highways in Andhra where the road is widened for drivers to park their trucks, catch a wink, cook food or wait for a prospective customer. (The Andhra government must be commended for its thoughtfulness, I note in my diary.)
Drivers there, many of whom were in limbo, waiting for a call from the commission agent for their next maal, showed me the cryptic messages they sent to dalals. Going by the ubiquity of these messages, it seemed the dalal system was well entrenched.
Vijayawada is the logistical centre of gravity of South East India—one arm stretching out to Chennai, one to Bangalore, one to Hyderabad, and another to Kolkata, the perfect meeting of the metros. It was also here that another sneaky, but more legalized, form of state corruption was revealed to me, with an innocuous technical name that did not betray its deviousness. Mechanical.
I was in Vijayawada’s vast, labyrinthine Auto Nagar—a grid of grease-coated roads jammed with truck-body builders, mechanics, transporters and commission agents, established way back in 1966, and touted by many locals as the largest Auto Nagar in not just Andhra or India, but in all of Asia.
As my conversations progressed, however, I found a number of truckers complaining about ‘mechanical’. Mechanical? What could be this? I was bewildered. After some pointed questions, I found that it’s a penalty of Rs 1000 that governments in Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and many other states charged from truckers, quite legally, along with receipt.
But curiously, none of the drivers seemed to agree upon the answer when I asked them what offence this ‘mechanical’ was extracted for. Some said it was charged because of the height of the load. Others said it was because of the size of the fuel tank. By virtue of its cryptic nature, ‘mechanical’ seemed to have become a penalty for whatever the trucker thought he was doing wrong—a barometer of his conscience.
However, this meant that the truckers whose consciences were clean, along with those cynically inclined, were convinced it was a ploy of the government to earn revenue on trumped up charges. Rameshwar Rai, a Bhumihar from Siwan, belonged to the latter category. ‘Mechanical is just a way for the government to earn money from us on false pretenses,’ he said, with supreme confidence.
To buttress his point, Rai hurried back to his truck and furnished a receipt. I studied the printed receipt, determined to figure out the reasons behind this levy. When I looked up, I was surprised to see a gaggle of drivers huddled around me, straining their necks, curious to know the secret of this ‘mechanical’, which was levied indiscriminately on all and sundry. It was probably the first time they had seen an educated person making their lonely business his own.
On the receipt was written: ‘Stopped and checked the above vehicle and found the following irregularities: U/S 190 (2) of Motor Vehicles Act.’ Finally, a concrete clue to this mysterious penalty. I Googled the section and found that it stated, but in more pompously cautious bureaucratese, that any driver whose vehicle violates the standards prescribed for road safety, noise pollution, and air pollution shall be fined one thousand rupees on the first offence, and two thousand for further offences.
It was obvious the text was deliberately worded to say nothing of definite cause or consequence, thus handing over an extraordinary amount of discretion to officials, who in turn were using this as a sledgehammer to penalize every trucker passing their way. I mean, ‘control of noise’? Did that imply a driver could be arbitrarily penalized one thousand rupees just because his truck’s rumble is too loud? In that case, they had better bring that electric truck revolution soon.
Going by the truckers’ testimony, officials seemed to be operating under the assumption that all the trucks in their jurisdiction were violating road safety and pollution standards. This was clearly legalized extortion, a systematic ploy to exploit a vague provision
of the motor vehicles law to augment the state coffers.
Multiple states were levying this ‘mechanical’. But who started it? The unanimous opinion of several truckers in different parts of Andhra was that it was Odisha, sometime at the turn of the millennium. ‘Odisha is a backward state. So it started using mechanical to beef up its revenues. But now this has become an epidemic. Most states have started levying it. No one wants to let go of this chance. After all, who wouldn’t want revenues for free?’ said Abdul Karim, a veteran trucker in Vijayawada who had been driving on India’s highways since the 60s.
He isn’t off the mark. Sheltered urban elites like to believe the rule of law prevails in India. But the reality is that the arbitrary levying of taxes by various local authorities—bandits, petty chieftains, rajas—is of ancient provenance in India. Indeed, the history of India’s micro-economy (its transactional history) reveals a lot about who we are as a people. One can even claim to recognize India’s civilizational continuity in the ‘perpetual give-and-take between legality and lawbreaking’ under which officialdom has always operated.
While India’s highways are very old—the Uttarapatha and Dakshinapatha are over 2,500 years old—it was Sher Shah Suri in the mid-16th century who made the most decisive attempt to extend the sway of central authority over the lawless highways. First, he launched a massive road building campaign, restoring the Uttarapatha that ran from Peshawar in the North West to Sonargaon in Bengal, and also laid fresh roads linking Agra to the Deccan, Marwar, and the Gujarat coast.
Truck de India! Page 19
