DELHI IS FAR AWAY

and pushed up and down precipitous paths by four wretched
humans. There was no alternative but walking: no vehicular
movement was allowed, save for the highest in the land. No private
cars, no buses, no horse-drawn vehicles, not even bicycles: walk
—often in torrential rain—or be pulled by your fellow-men who
would be wet and weary for a price.

Rickshaw transport is a slow, uncomfortable, and expensive
business: expensive to the hirer yet pitifully unremunerative to
the hired. To take a party to the cinema, say, a mile away and
back again, would cost by rickshaw in Simla two and a half times
as much as by taxi in London. But it works out at a little over 3d.
per hour per man, which with a ten-hour day, seven days a week,
gives a weekly income of i6s. gd. In fact, allowing for idle time,
and the exactions of the owners from whom the rickshaws are
rented, the rickshaw coolie is lucky if he makes more than Rs 12
to Rs 14 (i8s. to 2is.) a month, and many must make less, even
at the seasonal peak. There are, indeed, many Indians who get
less for more work. The rickshaw coolie is a scandal, not merely
because he earns so little, but because he earns it by degrading
work upon which human beings ought not to be engaged.

The load coolie of Simla is much wrorse off than the rickshaw
coolie in social status, and probably in earnings. Who could see
four men lashed together beneath a heavy crate, staggering up
the steep roads, or the perpetual ant-like stream of human figures
bowed under sacks of coal or baulks of timber, without blenching
at the thought of man's inhumanity to man—and nature's
niggardliness, too, that men should find this servitude better than
the bounty of the soil? The problem of the coolie, however, is
not primarily moral but economic, a problem in supply and de-
mand. Over-populated India provides the supply of men. The
steep hills provide the demand for an essentially extravagant as
well as heartless traffic. Imperialism is not responsible for either
side of this equation.

In 1942 the authorities set about building a motor road en-
circling Simla. Everyone knew and admitted that such a road
ought to have been built years before, as a necessary amenity and
a source of public economy, besides the secondary reason that it
would have made a start with abolishing the worst of the coolie

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