Truck de India!

by Rajat Ubhaykar

  The industry in Salem traces its origins to the tumult of the Second World War, when the Japanese occupation of South East Asia made it difficult for the British to import sago or sabudana, a source of cheap carbohydrates for its soldiers. This scarcity was astutely exploited by a dry fish merchant from Salem, who learnt the technique of manufacturing sabudana out of tapioca from a Gujarati Malaysian evacuee, and emerged as India’s first sabudana entrepreneur. Today, the Salem region enjoys a near-total monopoly over India’s sabudana production.

  In fact, this entire arid belt in western Tamil Nadu has a history of inclusive industrialization, of ‘entrepreneurship from below’ wherein local initiative, investment and excellence, ensures that the returns are also shared locally. Different towns in the region have established competence and at times, dominance, in niche industries—Salem over sabudana, Sivakasi over fireworks, Dindigul over locks, and Namakkal over the rugged art of fashioning trucks out of metal and wood.

  The industry in Namakkal district has an interesting history. It dates back to 1940, when pioneers by the name of Mariappa Asari, Raju Asari and Ponusamy Asari started the first truck body workshop. All of them belonged to the Vishwakarma caste of master craftsmen, carpenters and blacksmiths, who had decided to apply their traditional skills to a newfangled task.

  They were fortunate in that the region had already been a hub of blacksmiths proficient at making ox carts. These carts were used to transport cotton grown in Erode to nearby Tiruchengode, a weaving centre, and the manufactured textiles onwards to Salem. As carts gave way to trucks, this pool of blacksmiths was absorbed by the growing truck industry, which additionally enabled the proprietors to minimize their costs by employing skilled family labour.

  With the forests of the Western Ghats in Kerala and Karnataka, the very same mountains that prevented monsoon winds from unloading over Namakkal, providing a steady source of timber, the industry started to grow. The blacksmiths and their apprentices soon diversified into becoming truck drivers and khalassis, and Namakkal emerged as a transport town, slowly but steadily.

  It was only after 1968, when the Five States’ Permit system was introduced by the government, that the industry really took off. Truck owners from different parts of the country started coming to Namakkal, and their numbers only grew once the National Permit system was introduced in 1976.

  The eighties was the boom decade for trucking, when Namakkal started gaining countrywide fame for its truck bodies. The number of workers employed in truck body building shot up more than threefold from five thousand in 1980 to seventeen thousand in 1990.

  Today, the wisdom of the market says that if the Namakkal truck industry sneezes, all road operations in India catches a cold. But as I wander along the main road in Namakkal, the only sight that greets me is that of deserted workshops. Pongal. I couldn’t have chosen a worse time to visit. I’ve almost given up hope of talking to anyone when I finally spot one workshop that betrays traces of activity.

  It’s the Shankar Mahadevan song blaring on a loudspeaker which gives them away. I walk in the direction of the sound and soon come upon two men in grimy white baniyans noisily engaged in firming up a cabin. Curiously, there seem to be no truck drivers sitting around supervising their work, as in Sirhind.

  The proprietor, a middle-aged man in a green lungi and checked T shirt, tells me that is not how things are done here—the owners simply hand over the chassis, his workers make the body and cabin according to standard specifications within a month, after which the owners return to collect it. Clearly, trucking is a relatively unsentimental affair here. I ask him how long he’s been at it.

  ‘The industry is very old. My father started this workshop way back in 1983,’ he says. ‘I’ll admit it. We’ve enjoyed a good run. We built upon thousands of Leyland chassis over the years. But since the last five years, business has really come down,’ he says, holding out an inverted thumb for my benefit.

  In comparison, the nearby town of Tiruchengode is doing much better, he tells me. ‘I should have switched over to bore-well rigs when I had the chance,’ he says. I’m surprised to learn that rigging crews from Tiruchengode almost single-handedly dig bore-wells in parched earth all over the country, from Vidarbha to Bundelkhand to Rajasthan. It is yet another testament to the remarkable, but unsung entrepreneurial abilities and achievements of western Tamil Nadu. It is also apt—a region that has experienced the privations of water scarcity is now enabling others to deal with it; a region that has almost exhausted its own groundwater is now displacing earth in other places, scoping for that last drop of water.

  Muthuswamy is less hopeful for his own business. The biggest long-term threat he sees is the advent of company-made cabins. ‘I fear nobody will come to get their cabins made here. Especially after the government recently made A/C company cabins compulsory.’

  I’m shocked. When did the government make air conditioned trucks compulsory? How has that bit of news flown under my radar? And how come I haven’t seen a single one of these specimens?

  ‘I don’t know what they were thinking,’ he says. ‘Don’t they know the entire transport industry runs on mileage? Even if the trucks have an A/C installed, the owners will never let the drivers turn it on. And even if the owners let them, the drivers themselves won’t use it. They would rather save on the fuel and pocket the money. And to tell you the truth, most drivers have told me they don’t really prefer A/C. Natural air is much better, you see.’

  But even without the sword of air conditioning dangling over his head, Muthuswamy’s business is a gradual victim of structural changes in the freight industry. Freight transport in south India is much more formalized than the north—the playing ground of giant corporations like VRL, Transport Corporation of India, among others. The vehicle of choice for these big fleet owners are company-made containerized trucks, which are gradually taking over the truck industry, spelling doom for Muthuswamy’s workshop.

  Throughout my journey in south India, I had seen hundreds of these massive vehicles lumbering on the highways. Not a single one of them had paid heed to my outstretched thumb, for reasons best known to them. Little did I realize my luck was about to turn. And about time, considering I was nearing the terminal destination of my journey—Kanyakumari.

  I can already smell the ocean. I’m nearing the tip of the Indian peninsula. The barren environs of Namakkal have slowly given way to a deluge of foliage, and the sight of windmills whirring away in unison. It’s my first time inside a container truck, the longest truck I’ve been in so far. The cabin, however, is much smaller. The lyrics of a Bollywood song have been scratched over the dashboard in a childish scrawl. ‘Aa baahon mere bhar loon tujhe, khud ko bhool jau.’

  I’m with Akhilesh Singh, a swarthy, diminutive man from Samastipur, Bihar, dressed in a worn khakhi uniform and hunched over at the helm of his sixteen-wheeler. ‘Usually, we’re not allowed to pick up hitchhikers. But I made an exception for you since my trip is about to end,’ he says.

  I ask him how he likes driving in south India. ‘There’s no one here to ask you things like: where are you coming from or where are you going. They don’t bother container trucks here. But the people are a little strange. As a Ram bhakt, it seems odd to me that people here worship Raavan. They say “Tera swami mera swami ko maara”. I tell them, “Arre waisa karam karoge toh maar khaaoge hi na”.’

  I notice Akhilesh drives with extreme alertness, his hand at the ten and two, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. However, I can’t help but get nervous when we come across successive police barricades arranged in what seems like an on-the-go driving test.

  ‘Kitna satta ke lagate hain (Why do they have put them so close together?),’ Akhilesh grumbles, and artfully maneuvers the truck through them, ensuring the truck’s long, winding tail doesn’t collide with the barricades as he turns the steering wheel. Driving trucks as huge as this one is undoubtedly a skilled job, I think to myself, and more so, when you’re all alone and sleep-deprived.

/>   I ask him why he doesn’t have a khalassi accompanying him. He simply points to his rearview camera, the first I’ve seen on a truck.

  ‘That’s all I need,’ he says. ‘Taking a cleaner along costs up to ten thousand rupees per month. That’s why you’ll find that container gaadi will never have cleaners. It’s because bada companies don’t want to spend that much unnecessarily when their job can be done by a single person like me,’ he says.

  The bada company Akhilesh works for is a logistics firm headquartered in Kolkata that owns a fleet of more than ten thousand container trucks, an affair that is vastly different from working for a seth. For starters, Akhilesh is part of a union, with medical insurance for his family and regular contributions in his PF account.

  He also confirms Muthuswamy’s hypothesis. ‘Yes, some trucks in our fleet also have air conditioning. But the company doesn’t allow us to switch it on. The mileage reduces from 2.5 kilometre per litre to 1.5. How will the company earn a munafa?’

  Akhilesh’s truck, however, is au naturale. It’s a 2009 model curiously registered in Nagaland, like many other trucks I had seen across India.

  ‘It’s to save on tax,’ he explains. ‘Owners have a setting with RTO officials there, so getting a truck registered is much quicker.’

  His container specializes in delivering cars fresh from the factory to dealers all across the country. Presently, he’s transporting four Ford EcoSports from a manufacturing plant near Chennai to a dealer in Nagercoil, a town barely twenty kilometres away from Kanyakumari.

  He shows me the GPS device glowing on his dashboard, so the company can constantly track its position. Far from considering it surveillance, or a violation of his privacy, Akhilesh approves of it emphatically. ‘I feel it’s a good thing, because if anything happens to the driver, if the truck meets with an accident, or gets stolen, at least the company will know where to send for help,’ he says.

  But I notice that in contrast to the relatively hi-tech environment he operates in, Akhilesh still carries a feature phone. I ask why he doesn’t own a smartphone, especially since he travels long distance. ‘I did get one. But it got stolen. Gaadi line is too dangerous to carry smartphones.’

  There is also a FASTag sticker pasted on his truck’s windshield which ensures automatic payment at toll stations, reducing Akhilesh’s dependence on cash. He gets only a couple of thousand for expenses, and an ATM card for emergencies. ‘Cashless has taken off after notebandi. It also helps with highway robbery. What will the thief take when we don’t have any cash on us?’ he laughs.

  And after GST, a long distance driver like Akhilesh who traverses through several states is saving on a whole lot of time. ‘I save two full days on long trips like the one from Delhi to Guwahati,’ he says. ‘In fact, let me tell you the story of what happened to me once on that route. You won’t believe it. One time, I picked up three army jawans whose car had broken down near Siliguri. They were also going to Delhi. So when they found out that my truck could transport cars, they loaded their car on to my truck, and told me to take rest; they would be handling it from here on. All along the way, they beat everyone who stopped us to extort money. They didn’t care if it was a policewala or goonda. Faizabad, Firozabad, Kanpur—all these places, they gave the policeman one tight slap. In this fashion, they drove the truck all the way to Gurgaon. Saved me five thousand rupees that day.’

  It is late afternoon by now. The highway is lined by sunflower fields, interrupted by polytechnic colleges with humongous campuses. A Saravana Bhavan greets us every few kilometres, tempting my deprived taste buds. We pass an idol of Ganesha curiously draped in a sari. A hasty breeze ruffles through the clutch of papers on Akhilesh’s dashboard, as I glimpse the spur of a mountain in the distance.

  I feel… strange. I’ve been picturing this moment— the impending end of my journey—since the time I set out, but now that it’s here, I feel nothing. Perhaps, it’s because this trip was never about the destination, which was nothing but a chance geographical endpoint. It was about meeting people and seeing places along the way. It was about discovering India—its generosity, its desperation, its hospitality, obstinacy, and most importantly, the hope it carries within its bosom, the hope of a better life, and for truckers like Akhilesh, the hope of seeing your loved ones someday.

  Because while my journey is about to end, Akhilesh’s is set to go on. He hasn’t been home since the last eight months, and it’ll be a couple of months more before he will be able to visit. ‘I miss my family. I miss my kids. But what to do? You have to work hard to become something in life no?’

  His travels in this duration have taken him to auto manufacturing clusters all over the country—from Rudrapur and Haridwar in Uttarakhand, Manesar in Haryana, to Nashik and Pune in Maharashtra. But it’s not as if his trips leave him any time for sightseeing. ‘Every time I go to Nashik, I pass by the Shirdi Sai Baba temple, but I’ve not been able to visit even once,’ he says ruefully.

  For all his trouble, Akhilesh manages to earn between twenty-five to thirty thousand a month. ‘I have a fixed salary of Rs 10,000, an inaam of Rs 2,500 for every delivery, and on top of that, whatever I manage to earn by saving diesel,’ he says. ‘I used to drive a four wheeler earlier in Bihar. I started driving trucks to earn more. Now if I can’t even send home twenty thousand every month, what’s the point of driving this massive truck to strange places and putting my life at risk every day? I would rather stay back in the village.’

  Not that there’s much left for him to do in the village. His family, belonging to the Kushwaha community, owns a couple of hectares of land on which they grow mangoes, maize and vegetables. But with four siblings, it’s not enough for everybody. ‘Two of my brothers live off the land. Another one rears honeybees in these huge boxes. It’s a recent trend in our village.’

  As for Akhilesh, he is content with his job. ‘Who else would have paid a 10th class pass like me so much money? At least I’m able to educate my children in English medium schools.’ Akhilesh has two kids—a nine-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl. ‘I had to drop out of school due to majburi. I’ll make sure they never have to. I hope they will become big sarkari officers one day.’

  Just then, a private bus plying like a maniac overtakes us. An expletive escapes my lips. Akhilesh, however, proves to be sympathetic.

  ‘Everybody has their own compulsions. Bus drivers earn according to how many trips they do in a day. What we earn depends on how much mileage we’re able to extract. Also, the bus driver is assured of the support of his passengers in case something happens. The truck driver has no one. In fact, we know that the public will always blame us if an accident occurs.’

  This hostility is something Akhilesh always has to bear in mind while living out his life. But he finds solace in the fact that he’s at least well-placed in the hierarchy of truckers. ‘In my experience, the police don’t trouble container trucks as much as regular trucks,’ he says. ‘Company bosses often have settings with police at higher levels. So the police know to first look at the vehicle, and then decide how they want to treat you.’

  But the RTO officials are more rapacious. Akhilesh attests to the prevalence of ‘mechanical’ tax the truckers in Andhra Pradesh had railed against. But there are also times when truckers and consignors are genuinely at fault. Just a few hours back, Akhilesh was fined nearly nine thousand rupees, on the grounds that National Permit trucks are not permitted to do intra-state transport. He furnishes the receipt.

  We soon approach a toll gate—finally, a chance to see if the FASTag sticker actually works. Akhilesh turns away from the old-world trucks piled up behind each other and enters the empty, cashless lane reserved for the evolved FASTag vehicles. He brings his truck closer to the barrier. We wait for the sensor to detect our presence and give way. But nothing happens. We sit there honking. Akhilesh tries the customer care on his phone but it is inoperative. After a while, a toll booth employee finally runs towards us. He manually scans the vehicle, which
means that by the time we manage to get through, more than ten minutes have elapsed, more time than would have taken us with cash payments.

  In an hour, we reach another toll booth. To Akhilesh’s annoyance, the FASTag isn’t working here either. He argues with the attendant and protests that he doesn’t carry enough cash for tolls. ‘I have to fill my own stomach also no,’ he says. By this time, a queue starts building up behind us. The honking reaches a crescendo.

  In the meantime, a cavalcade with red beacons flashing importantly passes us through an empty lane reserved for it. It consists of a bunch of police vehicles escorting a couple of trucks carrying refrigerated hydrogen to Indian Space Research Organization’s Propulsion Complex in nearby Mahendragiri.

  ‘I will ensure you guys are put on the blacklist,’ Akhilesh finally says to the attendant, and grudgingly pays in cash.

  As we get closer to Nagercoil, the landscape starts reminding me of Kerala—narrow lanes, sloping roofs, the flash of wetlands. Except the region is resolutely Tamil, as becomes amply clear to me when I spot some LTTE flags with posters bearing Prabhakaran’s face. Nonetheless, ecologically, it is contiguous to Kerala rather than the dryland to its north. The Western Ghats, which form a continuous barrier with a handful of gaps, finally runs its course around forty kilometres north of Nagercoil, ensuring it receives the full blast of the south-west monsoons, along with Kerala.

  We’re almost there, and like me, Akhilesh is exhilarated at the prospect of the trip ending. ‘I’ll unload the truck, prepare some food for myself, eat it and go to sleep,’ he says. Ah, the simple joys of life. As Akhilesh drops me near a bus stop, I move to hand him two hundred rupees for his trouble. He pushes my hand away. ‘You haven’t exactly been sitting on my head all this while, have you?’ he quips, with an impish grin on his face.

  After covering more than two thousand kilometres across the spine of South India by truck, I finally find myself in Kanyakumari, by the sea. The frothy rage of the merging oceans here have driven many a great men to the point of introspection. Even an austere man like Gandhi was inspired to write grandiloquent words such as these: ‘I am writing this at the Cape, in front of the sea, where three waters meet and furnish a sight unequalled in the world. For this is no port of call. Like the goddess, the waters around here are virgin.’