The Morung Express is not a paper I read regularly. It covers a corner of the far North East of India squeezed between Bangladesh, China and Myanmar. I suspect visitors from Europe are few and far between. Anyway this worthy journal has just published a story about valet parking Morung style.
At Dhobinalla auto parking lot in Dimapur where the citiy’s auto-rickshaw drivers park, two boys are employed as “auto dhaka chokra” or auto push boys. It seems that as an auto-rickshaw leaves the boys’ job is to push succeeding rickshaws up the line. For this service, the boys get a few pence, and it appears that in total they push about 300 vehicles a day through the lot.
Now the Indian auto-rickshaw is a fine vehicle. True it produces about the same level of pollution as a small city and actually riding on one gives you a real insight to how a kamikaze pilot must have felt, so the boys produce a useful service in terms of their contribution to saving the planet. However the difference between two cultures is well illustrated by the article’s author’s view of the situation. They were concerned that the story showed just how lazy some of his fellow citizens had become. I wondered why, in a country that officially makes child labour illegal, these two boys weren’t at school?
Peter Guest
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