Why A Delhi Autowala wont go on METER

Ok well I finally made it to Bhopal and had that sort of unplanned trip that I and doku always thought to have. While returning via delhi we had a delay of 12 hours in Shaheed express oh sorry THE GREAT SHAHEED EXPRESS that made us roam around in delhi for the whole day in which we discovered a few things.

The first thing we discovered, that forms the basis of this article was from a small chat we had with our autowala bhaiya who agreed to take us from nizammuddin station to Old Delhi station in 80 bucks while the prepaid rate was 60. That’s 33% right! But we didn’t mind coz no one was ready to go and no one ever talks about meters in Delhi. The conversation with the rickshaw driver began with a small question about the cost of the auto rickshaw. The answer left us flabbergasted. The auto costs around 4,35,000. That much for a CNG auto rickshaw? I would rather buy a sedan in that amount. But what is that that makes the auto so costly coz a car with CNG costs just a wee bit more? Well the autowala was again much more knowledgeable in the field. Well the auto in actual costs around 1,15,000 to 1,40,000 but you don’t get the permit. It seems that the high level financers have struck a deal with the permit givers or got hold of all the permits and are reaping huge dividends out of it. Well that is what seemed to us.

Now lets do some justice to the topic as well. I ll present here some facts that were told to us by our driver. Well as we saw the rickshaw costs around 4.5L in which if someone makes a down payment of 1.5L to the financer he has to pay an EMI of 8025 bucks. This is coz the financers also charge an interest of 16%. Now after a person gets hold of an auto he delegates the job of driving @ 250 bucks per DEHADI. The word dehadi means here renting of auto for just 12 hours i.e. from 2 to 2. Now the auto owner rents it to two persons. Well now if we do some calculations here what we get is that the owner after parting with the EMI plus even around 3k for maintenance makes a profit of 4k PM over his investment of 1.5L i.e. 32% per annum plus the payment of the auto i.e. 8k PM that makes it 96% per annum. Where would you get a business line better than this?

Now there is another person. The one who pays the dehadi to our owner. Oh well when we were asking for the info to the rickshaw driver he overwhelmed us with the information. You know how good we feel when we are masters in one field and the one in front of us knows nothing of it. How good it feels to explain the nitty-gritty s like we know all. Human Nature. Well he told us that he made around 500-600 a day of which around 60-70 goes in Gas. Now after paying his dehadi, he s left with around 200 a day that comes to around 6k a month. Now mind you this 6k is being earned by a person who is the actual hard worker and that too in a city like Delhi where cost of living is high. Now why would that person go on meter? If the people above have a right to earn then doesn’t he? Why not he also charge some more to one who may, who knows, be the one who may be charging some more to others somewhere out there. What would he get out of being honest if his children and wife die of hunger? What would he do with honesty coz you cannot serve it on dining table, if he happens to have one?

What we see here is a typical case of the negligence of authorities in minding those people who are exploiting people and minting treasures. What that guy told us may be trivial and a very normal thing for us coz we see that connivance everywhere in our everyday life. Or this may be abnormal to us, an anomaly. But what we compare it to? There are questions which that autowala didn’t answer. Coz I never asked. You ask questions about facts but you don’t ask questions about corruption whose sanctity no one can challenge. You ask questions to be aware but not to awake. Every day we travel in those autos, those buses, use those services but how many times do we wake up. But do we actually sleep? Or just do one thing we were taught in our nursery classes. FINGERS ON YOUR LIPS