Among the great cities of the world, Kolkata （formerly spelt as Calcutta) , the capital of

Among the great cities of the world, Kolkata (formerly spelt as Calcutta) , the capital of India's West Bengal, and the home of nearly 15 million people, is often mentioned as the only one that still has a large fleet of hand-pulled rickshaws.

Rickshaws are not there to haul around tourists. It's the people in the lanes who most regularly use rickshaws— not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor. They are people who tend to travel short distances, through lanes that are sometimes inaccessible to even the most daring taxi driver. An older women with marketing to do, for instance, can arrive in a rickshaw, have the rickshaw puller wait until she comes back from various stalls to load her purchases, and then be taken home. People in the lanes use rickshaws as a 24-hour ambulance service. Proprietors of cafes or corner stores send rickshaws to collect their supplies. The rickshaw pullers told me their steadiest customers are school children. Middle-class families contract with a puller to take a child to school and pick him up; the puller essentially becomes a family retainer.

From June to September Kolkata can get torrential rains. During my stay it once rained for about 48 hours. Entire neighborhoods couldn't be reached by motorized vehicles, and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshaws being pulled through water that was up to the pullers' waists. When it's raining, the normal customer base for rickshaw pullers expands greatly, as does the price of a journey. A writer in Kolkata told me, "When it rains, even the governor takes rickshaws. "

While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure. Among India's 20 largest states, Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a few hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw pullers come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera— a combination of garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $ 2.50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you've visited a dera. They gross between 100 and 150 rupees a day, out of which they have to pay 20 rupees for the use of the rickshaw and an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if a policeman stops them for, say, crossing a street where rickshaws are prohibited. A 2003 study found that rickshaw pullers are near the bottom of Kolkata occupations in income, doing better than only the beggars. For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar.

There are people in Kolkata, particularly educated and politically aware people, who will not ride in a rickshaw, because they are offended by the idea of being pulled by another human being or because they consider it not the sort of thing people of their station do or because they regard the hand-pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism. Ironically, some of those people are not enthusiastic about banning rickshaws. The editor of the editorial pages of Kolkata's Telegraph— Rudrangshu Mukherjee, a former academic who still writes history books— told me, for instance, that he sees humanitarian considerations as coming down on the side of keeping hand-pulled rickshaws on the road. "I refuse to be carried by another human being myself," he said, "but I question whether we have the right to take away their livelihood. " Rickshaw supporters point out that when it comes to demeaning occupations, rickshaw pullers are hardly unique in Kolkata.

When I asked one rickshaw puller if he thought the government's plan to rid the city of rickshaws was based on a genuine interest in his welfare, he smiled, with a quick shake of his head— a gesture I interpreted to mean, " If you are

A．taking foreign tourists around the city

B．providing transport to school children

C．carrying store supplied and purchases

D．carrying people over short distances