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

 Rickshawsare not there to haul around tourists. It’s the people in the lanes who mostregularly use rickshaws—not the poor but people who are just a notch above thepoor. They are people who tend to travel short distances, through lanes thatare sometimes inaccessible to even the most daring taxi driver. An older womanwith marketing to do, for instance, can arrive in a rickshaw, have the rickshawpuller wait until she comes back from various stalls to load her purchases, andthen be taken home. People in the lanes use rickshaws as a 24-hour ambulanceservice. Proprietors of cafés or corner stores send rickshaws to collect theirsupplies. (One morning I saw a rickshaw puller take on a load of livechickens—tied in pairs by the feet so they could be draped over the shafts andthe folded back canopy and even the axle. By the time he trotted off, he wascarrying about a hundred upside-down chickens.) The rickshaw pullers told metheir steadiest customers are schoolchildren. Middle-class families contractwith a puller to take a child to school and pick him up; the puller essentiallybecomes a family retainer.

 FromJune to September Kolkata can get torrential rains, and its drainage systemdoesn’t need torrential rain to begin backing up. Residents who favor a touchof hyperbole say that in Kolkata “if a stray cat pees, there’s a flood.” Duringmy stay it once rained for about 48 hours. Entire neighborhoods couldn’t bereached by motorized vehicles, and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshawsbeing pulled through water that was up to the pullers’ waists. When it’sraining, the normal customer base for rickshaw pullers expands greatly, as doesthe price of a journey. A writer in Kolkata told me, “When it rains, even thegovernor takes rickshaws.”

 WhileI was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annualranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity andinfrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states, Bihar finished dead last, asit has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a couple hundred miles north ofKolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw pullers come from. Once inKolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—acombination 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) amonth, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera. Theygross between 100 and 150 rupees a day, out of which they have to pay 20 rupeesfor the use of the rickshaw and an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if apoliceman stops them for, say, crossing a street where rickshaws areprohibited. A 2003 study found that rickshaw pullers are near the bottom ofKolkata occupations in income, doing better than only the beggars and thebeggars. For someone without land or education, that still beats tryingto make a living in Bihar.

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

When I asked one rickshaw puller if hethought the government’s plan to rid the city of rickshaws was based on agenuine interest in his welfare, he smiled, with a quick shake of his head—agesture I interpreted to mean, “If you are so naive as to ask such a question,I will answer it, but it is not worth wasting words on.” Some rickshaw pullersI met were resigned to the imminent end of their livelihood and pin their hopeson being offered something in its place. As migrant workers, they don’t havethe political clout enjoyed by, say, Kolkata’s sidewalk hawkers, who, aftersupposedly being scaled back at the beginning of the modernization drive, stillclog the sidewalks, selling absolutely everything—or, as I found during the 48hours of rain, absolutely everything but umbrellas. “The government was thegovernment of the poor people,” one sardar told me. “Now they shake hands withthe capitalists and try to get rid of poor people.”

But others in Kolkata believe thatrickshaws will simply be confined more strictly to certain neighborhoods, outof the view of World Bank traffic consultants and California investmentdelegations—or that they will be allowed to die out naturally as they’resupplanted by more modern conveyances. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, after all, isnot the first high West Bengal official to say that rickshaws would be off thestreets of Kolkata in a matter of months. Similar statements have been made asfar back as 1976. The ban decreed by Bhattacharjee has been delayed by a courtcase and by a widely held belief that some retraining or social securitysettlement ought to be offered to rickshaw drivers. It may also have beendelayed by a quiet reluctance to give up something that has been part of thefabric of the city for more than a century. Kolkata, a resident told me, “hasdifficulty letting go.” One day a city official handed me a report from themunicipal government laying out options for how rickshaw pullers might berehabilitated.

“Which option has been chosen?” I asked,noting that the report was dated almost exactly a year before my visit.

“That hasn’t been decided,” he said.

“When will it be decided?”

“That hasn’t been decided,” he said.