Truck de India!

by Rajat Ubhaykar

  They tell me they drive only long-distance routes bridging the north and the south, which follow a broad logic. ‘We transport pakka maal such as powder, clothes, soap, chemicals from north to south and pick up kaccha maal such as ginger, mosambi, and tomatoes on the way back. Our seth has contacts with commission agents across the country. He tells us where to go. Our job is only to drive.’

  Just a few days back, they had transported sev from Delhi to Rajahmundry, and are now on their way to Anantapur district to pick up tomatoes which they’ll deposit in Dehradun. It seems intriguing to me that the movement of processed goods in their case is from north to south, and not the other way around, as one would assume, given the relatively higher levels of industrialization in southern India.

  For drivers, however, the kaccha maal or perishable goods, offer a better deal. They get a chance to earn an inaam if they manage to transport it on time. Ramu tells me that if they manage to transport the tomatoes within five days, their pay will be topped up by three thousand rupees. ‘It’ll only take us two days though,’ says Hari. ‘Our truck is new, so it shoots like a horse. And since it’s the three of us, one of us is always driving, even if others are resting.’

  Their trips are largely fuelled by bidis. They don’t drink on their trips, but Chhotu is fond of ganja, only the second trucker I’ve met to hold it dear. Chhotu is also prone to frequently taking his eyes off the road to soak in the conversation, making me nervous.

  ‘We like to finish our trips quickly,’ continues Ramu. ‘Get to make more money that way. We have three main sources of income—a fixed salary of Rs 6000, around Rs 8000 per trip, and an inaam for transporting perishables on time.’ This means a net income of around Rs 50000 per month.

  This cross-country movement has eased in the last ten years due to the construction of highways, especially national highways. ‘They’ve built bypasses for trucks so you don’t have to go through cities, and for many villages, they’ve built flyovers. So our journey is pretty smooth,’ says Ramu.

  The three seem to be content with their lives, a fun-loving trio that loves to drive in style. Their only complaint is that they get to spend only three days each month at home. But at the same time, they know their working conditions can get better.

  ‘Do you know American truck drivers even have a microwave and A/C in their cabin?’ asks Hari. ‘Also, they’re not permitted to drive beyond a certain number of hours every day.’

  I realize these are globalized, Whatsapp-savvy truckers who are aware of their rights, but find themselves unable to assert it on a national scale. ‘Ideally, there should be unions, but we don’t have one in our region. Though I’ve heard the Punjabi trucking unions are quite influential,’ says Hari.

  We are traversing a narrow single-lane ghat now, which this high-powered twelve-wheeler is able to negotiate like a hatchback. ‘It’s the latest Tata model. It can even overtake cars,’ Chhotu tells me, and proceeds to do just that at a bend, in a show of reckless bravado that I’ve learnt is typical of budding khalassis. The alarmed flashing of a headlight from the opposite side alerts us to the possibility of a collision. Chhotu dials down his ambition and applies the brakes.

  Once the danger has passed, Hari chastises him. They share an ustad–chela moment. ‘How many times do I have to tell you not to overtake at a turn or in places with an incline or decline?’ he says, laying down the basic precepts of trucking before him for the nth time. Baghel sulks like a child, and presses the accelerator ever so slightly to vent his resentment.

  Soon, I start seeing boards advertising Palamaner as the ‘Milk Capital of Andhra’, and within an hour, the Jha brothers and Chhotu drop me at the petrol pump in Palamaner. My friend picks me up, and over some rum and excellent pepper chicken at a local dhaba, we end up chatting until the crack of dawn. He tells me about his town’s sole connection to truck drivers. Earlier, when the road was not as smooth, trucks would frequently break down on the steep ghat nearby. So, some enterprising farmers started renting out their idle tractors to rescue the stranded trucks. It was a neat little business, until the new road put them out of business.

  It is afternoon by the time I’m able to leave for Bangalore. I’m a little hungover. Fittingly enough for the milk capital of Andhra, I find myself getting into a dairy truck, with the help of a resourceful rickshaw driver who ambushes a truck he knows regularly ferries passengers to Bangalore. The truck driver Hari, a stout man with a pencil moustache, dressed in a striped grey T-shirt and khakhi trousers, tells me he is transporting packaged curd to the NGO Akshay Patra’s offices in Bangalore, for use in the government’s mid-day meal scheme.

  Hari is an educated man. He has a B.Com degree and used to be a salesman for a dairy company, a relatively white-collar job. He tells me his switch to trucking was for purely financial reasons. He only managed to earn seven thousand rupees in his previous job, while driving trucks earns him an average of twenty-three thousand every month.

  ‘Yes, I know truck drivers are not respected in society, but respect doesn’t fill the stomach, does it?’ he says. A substantial part of his income, of course, comes from picking up hitchhikers on their way to Bangalore. ‘Hundred rupees per passenger,’ he says. I take the hint, and hand him the money.

  It’s one of the rare instances I’ve seen this parallel economy at work in the south, likely regularized by the gravitational pull of an expanding metro like Bangalore. As we drive towards the city, I spot many trees being cut for a road-widening project intended for the benefit of the countless pilgrims who travel every year to nearby Tirupati. It’s a distance of 150 kilometres from Palamaner to Bangalore, passing through a rocky vista of stunning beauty, punctuated by temples and lonely trees that cast tempting pools of shade.

  We’ve not even covered twenty kilometres when other hitchhikers start to appear—a farmer carrying a sack of rice, a college student with fashionable spiky hair glued to his cellphone, an office worker in a sari. The truck starts getting uncomfortably full. Soon, prospective hitchhikers themselves start baulking at the very idea of a journey in our truck. But magnanimous Hari doesn’t have the heart to say no to a single person. Clearly, as a dairy driver, he is well versed in the art of milking his truck.

  Just when I’m thinking there’s no chance more people will fit, Hari screeches his truck to a halt beside the next hitchhiker we see. Intimately acquainted with the cartography of his cabin, he seems to know exactly how many people it can take, and arranged in what manner. For every new person who joins us, Hari calmly orchestrates the gruff, but artful reordering of passengers, so another person can fit in with no major inconvenience felt by the rest of us. Of course, how you define inconvenience is another matter altogether, considering anybody who signs up for such a journey comes steeled for some degree of discomfort.

  I count the number of people in the truck. By the time we reach Bangalore, there are nine functionally immobile persons slotted by Hari in their respective positions. A couple of young boys are assigned places on the dashboard, with their backs to the windshield, leaving a little less than half of it exposed for Hari’s eyes. I look at him, calmly driving his truck, in the same nonchalant way he took on passengers, and think: here’s a man for whom a truck is first and foremost, an asset to be monetized, a man intent on monetarily making up for the respect he’s forfeited by choosing to become a truck driver. Why, he’s just managed to pocket a little under thousand rupees in a single trip. It’s all rather impressive. Perhaps, more truckers should be like him, I think to myself, as I jump out at a signal in Bangalore. Has kindness ever helped anyone better their circumstances?

  I spend the next few days in Bangalore in self-imposed house-arrest, under siege from the terrifying traffic of the city. Until one afternoon, a couple of days before Pongal, I decide to cross into the Deep South, launching headfirst into the equatorial heat of Tamilakam.

  The Tamils are perhaps the only people in the world to have systematically mapped their classical love poetry on the ba
sis of physiography. The ancient Sangam poets divided Tamilakam into five poetical modes or thinais corresponding to five ecological zones—the kurinji (highland), the mullai (forests), the marutham (cropland), neital (seashore), and palai (wasteland). The mood of love in the Sangam poems thus vary, depending on what thinai it is set in, an effect that is achieved by evoking the region’s climate, flora, fauna, deities, occupations, and even musical instruments.

  As I stand in Namakkal, I spot several grocery shops bearing names such as Kurinji and Malai. But there’s little doubt in my mind the landscape surrounding me is right out of the palai—a parched, sun-blasted scrubland with nary a thing growing out of its chalky brown earth. Except there’s something artificial about this landscape; it bears the imprint of human intervention, resembling a man-made disaster zone devoid of the graceful terror of the true desert. It evokes a lover’s despair at being separated, but also its complementary twin—hope, the hope of reconciliation—and once you’ve spent enough time wandering in the palai’s wastes—fantasy, the fantasy of being drenched with water.

  It’s this latter desire that Saravanan Kumar evinces when I run into him in the parking lot of the Southern Region Bulk LPG Transport Owners Association.

  ‘The water situation in Namakkal is so bad that forget about cultivation, we have to think twice before taking a bath. Every month, I spend over five thousand rupees on buying water from tankers. I’ve heard things have reached such a head now that there’s no water even if the tanker owners dig deep bore wells.’

  I’ve arrived smack in the middle of the Pongal holidays, and Namakkal wears a bare look, like an urban outpost of its arid surroundings. I reckon most of its inhabitants are catching a wink, or spending time with their families. The only persons I spot are a couple of farmers who have purchased bright green tractors on this auspicious day, and are wheeling it back to their village, glee writ large on their faces, though I am not sure what hardy crops dare to grow here.

  Near the parking lot is an empty ground, its entrance framed by a large makeshift gateway inviting people for a Special Blessing Meeting, organized by a missionary group called ‘Jesus Calls’, which bears the catchy tagline: Praying For The World. Barring this religious anomaly, much of the town’s walls are plastered with coaching class posters that assure the purveyor of guaranteed success in the entire gamut of competitive examinations.

  Saravanan is the only truck owner in the parking lot today. The Association office is shut. So, having adorned his truck’s windshield with stalks of sugarcane and flowers, as is traditional practice on Pongal, he leans against his bike in the noonday sun, and squints at me half-irritated. He is a reedy thirty-year-old man dressed in a sparkling white lungi and shirt, amusingly prone to employing his preferred catchphrase—‘Not allowed’— to refer to things he disapproves of.

  It begins with his diagnosis of Namakkal’s water scarcity. He blames the flourishing poultry industry in Namakkal, which supplies 60 per cent of Tamil Nadu’s eggs, for its water crisis. ‘Poultry farm. Not allowed,’ he barks. I learn from him that chickens consume as much as one litre of water every day. Multiply that number on an industrial scale, add the water consumed in processing poultry, and you have an enormous water footprint on your hands. (Saravanan is a bit conflicted though, considering poultry provides for most of his transport load.)

  ‘These days, it’s no use being in the motor line,’ he says. ‘There’s no money. If you really want to prosper, open a poultry farm or even better, start a school or college. The cash will keep pouring in. It’s what all the politicians and big shots here are doing nowadays,’ he says.

  ‘I’m also planning to do the same the moment I get a chance. You see till 1998, truck drivers were happy. They were making enough money and had some respect in society. But now, the respect is lost, commodity prices have shot up, but freight rates have remained the same.’

  With that, he launches into a soliloquy, as if he had been waiting for someone to ask about his problems all his life.

  ‘At the moment, I own three trucks. I drive one myself. Mostly intra-state. But still my existence is hand to mouth. The government takes away half my money in road tax and bribes. It makes us install speed governors at our own cost. Insurance premiums have gone up over four fold in the last ten years. Diesel rates have also increased. On top of that, the government has started daily revision of diesel prices. It has made my life miserable through sheer uncertainty. I mean, how are you supposed to price freight if you don’t know what the diesel rate is going to be tomorrow? All my calculations go awry. The earlier system, when they changed it once in two weeks, was much better.

  ‘It is also becoming difficult to find drivers. There is demand, but not many people are joining this field. Those who join are uneducated. But even these have reduced after the government made 10th class compulsory for a National Permit license. Now you tell me, why will an educated man join the motor line?’

  Saravanan’s concerns are also being felt by the government, whose official figures cite a 22 per cent shortfall in truck drivers. If corrective measures to address this are not taken, it won’t be long before this growing shortage of drivers intensifies into a full-blown crisis. Who will transport our goods then? Why, that may just be the tipping point required for our society to recognize the value of truck drivers.

  Strangely enough for someone who lives in the heart of Tamilakam, Saravanan claims to be Telugu. He says he belongs to the community of Rajakambalam Nayakars. Back in the 14th century, his ancestors are said to have fled their homeland in the lands north of the Tungabhadra in the wake of the Muslim invasion led by the Delhi sultans. Migrating southwards, they had enlisted with the Vijayanagara kings, and ultimately settled in the Madurai region as poligars or landed military governors.

  When the British arrived in the late 18th century, the poligars presented one of the most formidable challenges to their authority. Their struggle pre-dates the revolt of 1857 by a considerable margin, but hasn’t been highlighted as much in the Indian nationalist historiography. But here, in Tamilakam, these poligars are still revered as heroes and symbols of Tamil resistance. Schools, colleges, and even defence installations are named after them.

  On the coast near Tirunelveli, lies INS Kattabomman, the naval transmission facility crucial for reliable communication with India’s nuclear submarines, whose 471-metre masts are the tallest military structures in the world. It is named after the most storied of all poligars—Veerapandiyan Kattabomman of Panchalankurichi, who refused to pay tax to the East India Company, went to war for the sake of his pride and autonomy, and was ultimately executed for his audacity. Kattabomman, Saravanan confides in me with more than a hint of pride, belonged to his community.

  ‘But here, in Namakkal, in Kongunadu, the Gounders are the most powerful community. MPs, MLAs, all Gounders. Everyone else; not allowed.’ Considering his distaste for both dominant Tamil parties—DMK and AIADMK—and given that the actor Rajinikanth has recently joined politics, I ask Saravanan if he will consider voting for him.

  ‘Rajinikanth?’ he says. ‘Waste… Not allowed. He may be a big film star but motor line people will never vote for him. He did not stand up for Tamil drivers during the Kaveri agitation. Our trucks were being destroyed by the Kannadigas, our drivers were being beaten up, but he didn’t say a word. We know very well that since he hails from Karnataka, his loyalties will always lie there.’

  The Kaveri dispute, which appears like a remote occurrence in newspaper headlines, is clearly the most emotive issue in this region, where anybody who lays claim to your water is your worst enemy. I don’t bother to mention to Saravanan that my native village is in Karnataka.

  Interestingly, the person whose entry into politics Saravanan is awaiting the most is U. Sagayam, a legendary honest IAS officer known for taking on the DMK scion M. Alagiri at the peak of his power by cracking down on the granite mining mafia in Madurai. He has since become the stuff of local folklore in Tamil Nadu. But Saravanan�
��s reverence for Sagayam is even older.

  ‘When Sagayam was collector ten years ago in Namakkal, he was known for equal treatment to everybody. Like other children, his children too went to study in the government school. When politicians tried to have him transferred, thousands of people protested his transfer. If people like him join politics, there’s no reason why I won’t vote for them.’

  It’s been over half an hour since we started chatting, and the hot sun is clearly beginning to bother Saravanan. He’s had enough of me. He climbs on to his bike, and unceremoniously kicks it to life. I hasten to ask him one last question. As a transport owner, does he overload his truck? ‘Of course I do. Twice my truck’s capacity,’ he confesses. ‘There’s no other way I can turn a profit. If you load according to the rules, you will always be in the red.’

  But can your trucks take the overloading?

  ‘Why won’t they? They were built right here,’ he says, revving up the engine. ‘In Namakkal. You go anywhere in the south and ask about truck bodies, they will 100 per cent mention the name Namakkal.’

  Fittingly, it was the debilitating scarcity of water and the resulting unviability of agriculture that supplied the driving force for entrepreneurship in the Namakkal– Salem region. It was something I learnt on the way. On my way to Namakkal from Bangalore, I stopped for a day in Salem. When I spoke to drivers there, I noticed most of them seemed to regularly ferry sabudana, India’s favourite fasting feast, to all parts of India, but particularly to Maharashtra, a state well-known for its voracious appetite for sabudana khichdi and vadas. It was something that led me to discover that Salem is the unsung sabudana capital of India.