In the medieval era, on the other hand, parenthood was far from fawning. It was relatively more detached, to put it mildly. Selling your children for a pittance during famines was par for the course. In an age of mass illiteracy and poverty, children were first and foremost, an economic resource to be tapped. Infant mortality was common, so parents learnt not to get too emotionally attached to their children.
This can also be seen reflected in pre-Renaissance European paintings, where the faces of children are not of the innocent babes we see today, but those of grim adults. The idea of children as innately innocent creatures, delicate beings that need to be shielded from sexuality, was popularized by the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau only in the late 18th century in his book Emile, Or on Education, and it was only in the 19th century that present attitudes started taking root with the spread of mass education.
However, this was a gradual process. Even in progressive Britain, the Industrial Revolution was powered by the hard labour of little hands toiling for inordinately long hours in regimented factories, as chronicled in Victorian-era works like Oliver Twist. It was only in 1833 that the employment of children younger than nine was prohibited by law.
In India, however, the situation continues to be dire. Here, the medieval and the modern are engaged in an endless tussle, their arena encompassing both our individual souls and the society at large. In spite of legislation prohibiting child labour, millions of kids lead their lives as ‘little men’, especially on our highways, and behave like it too, displaying a kind of forthrightness and maturity that is unmistakably, tragically adult. They’re even dressed exactly like them—the kid who eventually fetches us aloo parathas is wearing a checked shirt and polyester pants, like a bonsai adult. It is certainly not something that was bought from the ‘children’s section’ of a clothing store.
Shyam proceeds to catch up on some sleep on a charpoy. Rajinder, who’s still sticking to his no-sleep resolution, traipses towards me with two half-full plastic water bottles, but with no cap. It doesn’t take me long to realize what he’s implying. I ask him if there’s a toilet nearby, but he merely shrugs and nods in the direction of the Aravallis that sprawl opposite the dhaba.
‘It’s much cleaner this way, trust me,’ he says, and leads the way.
It is hard to believe these undulating, denuded hills—marked by linear green strips of cacti and the ugly scars of quarries—are one of the oldest mountain ranges on the planet. We cross the highway, walk up the scrubby path dodging thorny bushes, and after a short trek up the hill, diverge to achieve privacy. I make sure Rajinder is out of my line of sight, and I’ve barely settled down when a primal presence attracts my attention. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot two screeching langoors leap in my direction, waving their tails up in the air in greeting. I’m petrified. But there’s nothing I can do except hold fort in tense anticipation, and hope they don’t bode any ill-will. Their sharp incisors make me think otherwise, but nonetheless I try my best to stay calm, desperately seeking to make myself invisible. Much to my relief, the langoors change course, before I have to take more drastic measures, like fleeing with the job only half-done.
I’m certain my travails are past, when a peacock concealed in the bushes behind me takes flight in a flurry of colour, its avian reverie interrupted by the langoors. I am thoroughly alarmed by now, like a besieged wild animal with its foot caught in a snare. So this is how much of India performs their morning ritual, I wonder: in the lap of nature, and prone to being bitten or attacked by a variety of creatures.
Shyam wakes up hours later. As we order lunch, he finally spots an exhausted Rajinder dozing off at the table, in spite of his best efforts at staying awake. Shyam smacks him squarely on the back of the head with great satisfaction, just as Rajinder appears to be drifting into deep sleep. He wakes up with a start, and with astonishing speed, proceeds to pretend he never fell asleep, like the smack was not real. Tough love, I think to myself. I can’t help smiling.
‘Why did you become a driver?’ I ask Shyam.
Shyam, who’s proved to be a man of few words so far, says, ‘In a word… music. In Kangra, as a child, I had many cousins who drove trucks. They would allow me to ride with them sometimes, and play songs all along the way. Those are some of the best memories I have. That’s when I decided I should get into this line—drive trucks to distant places, listening to music all along. I was not interested in studies, all I wanted was my music.’
It makes sense now. His delightfully curated music collection was not just serendipity at work. He’s probably spent years perfecting his playlist. I compliment him again on his taste in music, and ask him about his favourite song.
‘You know Kishore Kumar’s “Jeevan ke safar mein rahi”… that one.’
‘Can you sing it for us?’
I hadn’t expected him to do it, considering his reserved nature so far, but Shyam only hesitates for a moment before breaking into the song, his sonorous voice piercing through the din of the dhaba. ‘Jeevan ke safar mein rahi, milte hain bicchad jaane ko, aur de jaate hain yaadein, tanhaayee mein tadpane ko… (In the journey of life, we meet many fleeting companions, who leave behind memories to torment us in times of loneliness).’
He stops there. ‘Mere jeevan ka yahi usool hai (It’s my life’s motto),’ he confides.
Embarrassed by this show of sentimentality, Shyam, who unlike Rajinder, is a believer in brevity, signals that we should be on our way. Once we’re back on the highway, I manage to decipher some of the less mutilated milestones and realize that Udaipur is not far away. When I mention this to Rajinder, he grows excited. ‘You know that’s where I had my first beer? I remember they served it with bhujia. It’s a beautiful place. You must visit it sometime.’
I contemplate his inadvertent advice. Udaipur. The capital of Mewar. The city of lakes. Bollywood’s backyard. That wouldn’t be such a bad idea. A trip like this was not meant to have an itinerary anyway. Upon realizing that I’m considering taking his advice, Rajinder immediately regrets his nostalgic reminiscence and proceeds to sulk silently for the next few minutes, with the listless look of a man who has sensed he has lost the only person in the world who would listen to his stories.
I feel terrible. I sneak glances at him, hoping for some reaction, but he’s determined on maintaining radio silence. With guilt gnawing on my insides, I tap his shoulder and say, ‘Rajinder bhai, you don’t worry. I promise we’ll meet again. I will be coming to Delhi in a few days. Give me your phone number and address and I will come find you. Let’s have a drink together.’
‘Pakka, hundred per cent we will meet,’ he smiles, recovering his composure. He immediately gives me a missed call. I hand him my notebook and a pen for his address. Shyam observes in amusement. ‘Oye Rajinder, when was the last time you wrote something, huh?’ he laughs.
Our truck soon arrives near the exit to Udaipur. As Shyam applies the brakes to my journey, both of them urge me to rethink my impulsive plan. ‘Come to Delhi with us. Masti marte hue jaayenge (We’ll have fun on the way),’ urges Rajinder. Shyam echoes this sentiment. I am touched. But I also realize that I shouldn’t impose myself on them anymore. During the course of the journey, both of them had proved themselves to be stubbornly proud folk who hadn’t let me pay for any of the food. ‘You are our mehmaan (guest),’ Shyam had said with decisive firmness.
It is probably best if I call it a day. I heave my backpack and jump off the truck. Rajinder leans out, waving goodbye. I wave back, and stand there watching, as Shyam’s truck merges with others on the highway, soon rendered indistinguishable, a diminishing speck in the distance.
The share auto I squeeze into next seems unusually vulnerable after a night in the truck—too compact, too low down. Perhaps, these are the usual side effects of prolonged riding with the king of the road, I think to myself. But it is only when I fill in ‘truck’ as my mode of transportation in the hotel ledger at Udaipur does the utter ludicrousness of my endeavour truly hit home.
The Cartels of Mewar
The Transport Nagar in Udaipur sports a deserted look today—a grid of lanes with slammed shutters, a handful of parked trucks, and a lone chaiwala with his bicycle under the shade of a tree. I have come here in the hope of arranging a truck for my journey ahead, and this desolate sight is dispiriting. But at least we have chai, I console myself.
I learn from the chaiwala it is the day of Mahavir Jayanti, a government holiday. Not that it should matter in an industry like transportation, where even Sundays are working, but Jainism has a powerful presence in Udaipur. The brokers and commission agents, many of them Jains, seem to be enjoying a day of rest, with a few exceptions.
Pradeep Singh Shekhawat is one of them. Shekhawat is the archetypal burly Rajput—a flourishing moustache, an assortment of rings on his fingers, a white shirt tucked into blue denim jeans fastened by an outsized belt buckle, dusty black boots—the Wild Wild West aesthetic married to Rajput swagger. He tells me he originally hails from the Shekhawati region of north Rajasthan bordering Haryana, but has spent the last twenty years in Udaipur as a commission agent.
His office is cavernous. Shekhawat and his desk occupy one corner. The rest is covered by a haphazard clump of mattresses which several truckers are occupying in the embarrassing contortions of deep sleep. Some are crumpled in the foetal position: polyester pants and off-white baniyans imbued with an air of infantile vulnerability. Others are sprawled over gloriously. It is April and a single fan circulates the hot air of the room. It is so painfully slow that I can actually see the blades of the fan whirring.
‘Don’t mind them. Most of them have just returned from a trip,’ says Shekhawat. He offers me a seat opposite him. Most of his desk is smothered by stacks of bills, official paperwork, and a couple of kaleidoscopic paperweights. And three feature phones, I write in my logbook.
‘Do you think it will be possible for you to help me catch a truck from here to anywhere north?’ I ask him. ‘You see, I am writing a book about truck drivers, travelling with them across India. The Transport Nagar is the first place I thought of visiting. But not many shops seem to be open.’
‘Yes. Today might be difficult. But if you can wait for a while, I think I might have something for you,’ he says. He points towards his phones. After half an hour in Shekhawat’s office, I’m convinced his wife must admonish him for spending too much time on the phone. It’s like an extension of his body, through which he is constantly directing truck drivers to their destination and fixing new deals with agents.
He tells me he comes from an ‘Army line’. ‘My village, which has around 750 families, has contributed hundreds of men to the Indian Army over the years. Naturally, I wanted the same. But as a child, I did nothing but play cricket. Badmash tha (I was naughty). I passed 10th class, but failed to pass recruitment. That was the end of my army dream. Left with no other choice, I got into this line with the help of an uncle.’
So now, Shekhawat channelizes his patriotic drive in other ways. He is an enthusiastic member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist volunteer body recognized as the parent organization of India’s ruling party—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—all of them members of one vast ideologically knit family called the Sangh Parivar.
‘I do dharma jagran (religious awakening) for the RSS, educating people about “love jihad” by organising sammelans (gatherings) in their villages. As a swayamsevak it is my duty. My father was a swayamsevak too,’ he says.
‘What is this love jihad?’ I ask him. ‘Arre you don’t know? Yeh mullon ki saazish hai (It is a Muslim conspiracy). They train their young boys and equip them with mobile phones and motorcycles so they can woo our girls, marry them and convert them to Islam. It is important to educate our people that this is happening so they can keep their daughters safe,’ he says.
He points to the smartphone in my hand. ‘You see that? It’s a dangerous thing. I have always advocated that girls’ use of mobile phones should be restricted. This way, they won’t get distracted. Because this mobile is the biggest instrument of love jihad,’ he says.
He also advocates the renaming of cities with Islamic names to their primordial Hindu names. ‘Why should our cities be called Aurangabad and Allahabad? The government must change Aurangabad to Deogiri at once,’ he says, his moustache quivering with rage.
Commission agents such as Shekhawat form the backbone of the freight transport industry. The freight transport industry, in many ways, is the domain of the dalal—the broker. They are the real market makers, the movers and shakers. Behind the banal act of a loaded truck setting off on a new trip, there are up to three intermediaries. It’s not the simple matter of a goods consigner calling up a trucker to hop on for delivery.
The industry is highly fragmented. On one hand, you have the consignor, who wants his goods transported. On the other is the truck operator, who is willing to provide his services for the same. And in between you have two sets of brokers, one for the consignor and one for the operator—the booking agent and commission agent respectively.
Shekhawat is a commission agent. His job is arranging maal—or load—for truck owners and drivers. For this, he relies on the booking agent, the dalal representing the demand side—the goods consignor. He is in touch with many such agents. Shekhawat lays down his three phones on the table next to each other—one phone for the booking agents, one for the drivers and the other is his personal number.
Three-fourths of the total freight transport business is dominated by truck operators who own less than five trucks. Those owning more than twenty trucks constitute only 10 per cent. These larger players usually rely on formal contracts with corporates and big businesses, possessing enough bargaining power and marketing clout to not have to rely on intermediaries.
Meanwhile, smaller operators like singer Shyam are compelled to rely on booking agents like Shekhawat. The only effective entry barrier in the industry is that a rookie driver wouldn’t know where to get the maal from without the services of a commission agent. Shekhawat charges anywhere between 600 to 1000 rupees from drivers for arranging a load—Rs 600 for a sixteen ton truck, Rs 800 for a twenty-one ton truck, and so on. The current freight rate is Rs 1750/ton, he says.
And how is the freight price decided? ‘The rates fluctuate depending on the fuel price and the demand situation. If it is the rainy season and nobody wants to send their goods out, then bekaar (idle) truckers will agree even at a lower price. If it is, say, Diwali, everybody will have maal they want to send out, then the freight prices will go up accordingly.’
But while the prices follow these broad macroeconomic factors, it is also an open secret that the industry is characterized by a huge amount of information asymmetry, mostly in favour of the intermediaries. Unlike, say China, where fluctuating freight rates are updated either electronically or on chalkboards in truck depots, prices in India are opaquely agreed upon, mostly fixed by booking agents over the phone.
Except organised players, most of the truck operators rely on informal agreements in their dealings with commission agents. A Mumbai University study describes these agreements as highly ‘iniquitous’—one of those understated words that actually means ‘grossly unfair and morally wrong’, i.e., villainous.
This is because the dalals exploit their vice-like choke over the flow of information in the value chain to collude with each other in fixing prices such that they corner a share of the proceeds that is disproportionate to their investment or risk; it is at odds with how much skin they have in the game. Meanwhile, the trucker, who is risking his life and his vehicle, negotiating killer highways, gets the short end of the stick. What’s worse, this unnecessarily fat commission also gets embedded in the cost of the product, leading to higher prices, thus pinching the consumer.
But, as Shekhawat confesses, the real power of price fixation lies with the booking agents, since even commission agents like him are dependent on them for business. ‘We find out the prevailing rate
from the agent. What to do? They have the advantage of dealing directly with the consignors,’ he says.
An additional layer of information asymmetry. Naturally—and there are many studies that attest to this—a high level of cartelization prevails among booking agents, either in the form of cozy price-fixing arrangements or agreements to delineate areas of operation. This enables them to squeeze out a profit margin as high as 25 to 30 per cent on the freight realized. Shekhawat resents this disparity.
Vigorously exploring the innards of his nostrils, he reserves unflattering words for the booking agents. ‘They get all the malai. I’m not left with much. On top of that, they heap the responsibility of the trucker on me. I have all the liability but none of the profit.’
It was in 2003, more than a decade after the onset of liberalization in 1991 that India decided to create an empowered regulator—the Competition Commission of India (CCI)—to investigate complaints of cartelization against companies in its burgeoning private sector. Unfortunately, its track record hasn’t lived up to expectations.
The CCI, like many competition watchdogs across the world, has faced varying degrees of difficulty in enforcing their orders and in proving the very existence of cartelization. This is because cartel members are often careful not to leave behind any paper trail of their collusive activities, forcing investigators to rely on thin circumstantial evidence that fails to pass the scrutiny of an appeal court.
The CCI discovered this the hard way when it tried to address cartelization in the freight transport industry. In February 2015, the CCI imposed a 10 per cent penalty on the average turnover of the All India Motor Transport Congress (AIMTC)—the apex body of Indian transporters—after receiving complaints of cartelization. The complaint, filed by S.P. Singh of the Indian Foundation for Transport Research and Training (IFTRT), stated that the AIMTC indulged in cartelization by directing all its members to hike truck rentals by 15 per cent after an increase of Rs 5 in diesel prices was announced by state-run oil marketing companies in September 2012.
Truck de India! Page 3