Why India Needs To Encourage Bicycle Usage — Infravisioning With Vinayak Chatterjee

Vinayak Chatterjee: I probably gave up riding a cycle in my mid-20s, but it was around 35 when with my young daughter and family, we were in some resort and these resorts have those bicycles for riding around the beaches and within the resort.

That was probably my mid-30s but that was one sporadic incident, but I must say, it relates to memories of youth when one gets large amount of kilometrage on bicycle, and I am sure you and many of the viewers would have done.

Vinayak Chatterjee: In infrastructure, whenever we talk of transportation, the talk is always about e-vehicle, metro rails, train, bus rapid transit systems, railways, highways—somewhere in the entire discourse, the humble bicycle, forget being discussed, is not even in the consciousness and it is interesting in a situation where world over, city planners are redesigning city centres to prevent motorised vehicles.

So, here is an interesting urban planning momentum that's gathering which says we are going to ban motorised vehicles. So, what will replace motorised vehicles in large tracts of dense inner-city tracks in our cities, it would be pedestrianisation. It would be cycles and possibly for the aged and for the physically challenged, it will probably be small electric golf carts to help people go around.

In the middle of all of this, the biggest, shall we say alternative, will be bicycles and this is the emergent trend in city planning. If that is so, then the billion-rupee question for Indian city planners is with all the talk of smart city and redesigning city centres—while Chandni Chowk has become a non-motorised walkway, so has the entry to the Golden Temple in Amritsar. You can see the beginnings of stopping motorised vehicles in our cities.

We have to revise the conversation about the humble bicycle. Around 20 years ago, nobody would have thought that smoking would be socially unacceptable. Our children, our grandchildren will probably never see a coal-driven locomotive. Our grandchildren when they grow up will probably be bemused that you actually had to put a liquid substance called petrol or diesel in your vehicle because they all will see electric cars.

So, interestingly, as people and as Indians travel all over the world they are going to see a resurgence of bicycle use in urban centres, which requires a completely fresh mindset in urban city planning and will come to rural areas later.

Vinayak Chatterjee: You know, there are development issues, and there are economic issues. Let me talk about the development issues first. There are enough studies to show that government programmes giving free bicycles to girls have played an important role in ensuring higher female enrollments.

There were two issues, toilets for girls in schools and bicycles to help them reach. While Bihar has become famous for giving cycles to schoolgirls, that's well-known in development circles. Even West Bengal has gone one step further and offers cycles to all students of Class 10 to 12 in government schools across the state. So, evidently, there is a very strong development, shall we say, angle giving bicycles to schoolgoing children.

Then, the economic angle of saying increase in productivity. Now, interestingly, we find that the usage of bicycles in urban India is actually stagnating and going down city by city. Whereas even now 49% of workers who travel up to 10 kilometres for work in many urban centres do so by walking and probably the number is equivalent in rural areas. So, people are spending a lot of energy, personal energy burning calories and time in walking to their destinations in suburban peripheries of cities and evidently across huge rural areas.

Now, the issue is that if bicycles were given, it would usually raise productivity, with consequent development fallout to economy as well as to the earning capacity of the individual. Now, think of a MGNREGA worker who is jobless and is enlisted in the MGNREGA scheme. He lives in a little hamlet and to enlist and get a MGNREGA programme he has to walk 15 km. His daily wage and earning is about Rs 150 after everything is cut and distributed. That’s it. He even lives on subsistence; he lives on that Rs 150 a day to buy food and feed his family.

Cycles today are pretty expensive and it's not what we used to buy when we were young. Today, a good cycle would cost between Rs 6,000 to Rs 10,000, a basic black model. ...The MGNREGA figures are huge, their enrollments are in lakhs. How would a MGNREGA-type labourer enlisted in that programme be expected to buy a Rs 10,000 bicycle without a bank loan?

Unfortunately, banks do not give loans to bicycles because they feel that they can’t track it and the loan repayment, etc., but they are happy to give a loan for two-wheelers or a moped. So, these are anomalies in the system which require a certain focus and course correction. 

Vinayak Chatterjee: See, for the solutions, that is horses for courses. In urban India, if we honestly don't have easy dedicated cycling tracks for cyclists, the cyclists will get knocked down by traffic and it is a headache, people will say I would rather walk.

So, somewhere, we will have to force the pace of cycling and if it can't be done at ground level, we may have to invest in lanes which are elevated. But obviously, the cyclists will require a kind of a moving escalator-type ramp so that the physical effort of a client is not there—it goes up the ramp, the kind you find in many airports, not escalators but moving walking ramps.

Now, solutions like these will have to be found in inner cities and in city planning and in the extensions of cities where city town planners are giving new plan sanctions for semi-urban or urban areas. They will have to incorporate serious cycle tracks.

In rural areas, the issue is of giving cycles on a used basis of a simple amount of 50 paisa a day to gram panchayats on a pay-by-use basis, or even free should be part of the CSR mandate, so that corporations can give let us say 100 bicycles to a panchayat and the panchayat can have a system since everybody is living there. The person takes a cycle in the morning, he returns it, it is 50 paisa a month multiplied by three or Rs 15 per month, 30 paisa a day or 10 paisa a day, Rs 3 to Rs 15, whatever, it is a small amount. But I am sure men and women labourers working in brick kilns, working in MGNREGA, working in construction sites will start using bicycles.

That's the solution I would think in rural areas, put it on the CSR list or encourage people to just donate it to panchayats as a part of the foundation charitable activities for rural affairs because people are spending money in reviving water bodies, putting solar rooftops in villages, doing cheap lighting. You just add bicycles to the list of eligible projects for CSR, and even otherwise encouraging. That's the rural solution. 

Vinayak Chatterjee: I want to make the last point. We Indians are very good at jugaad (workaround). So, why should we have a mindset that a cycle can only be driven by one person. You see the bikes in Europe, bikes where two or more people drive it together.

So, if there are a group of girl children going to schools together, why can't the jugaad (workaround) be actually like a four-pedal, four-wheel cycle for school children riding together and having fun, instead of just a conventional thinking that it should be a two-wheeler cycle.

All this is possible. So, it was an interesting discussion, because nobody ever discusses bicycles.