My all-time favorite movie is ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’. The film is like a buddy cop movie that pairs Steve Martin and John Candy. When the men’s flights home for the holidays are canceled, they embark on a three-day adventure to get home, taking as the name would suggest – Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It’s monsoon season in Rajasthan and as such I have been spending more time indoors and re-watching movies, which gave me inspiration for this blog post.
Transportation while less discussed than topics such as inclusion, is equally as important to the employment of people with disabilities. In my conversations with hotel owners and managers in the past ten months, a common refrain emerges. Employers are extremely anxious that the people they hire to work will not be able to find consistent transport to and from the job sight and that this will make their employment untenable. This focus on transport made me a consider a less discussed form of transport that is of course the bus.
Rajasthan State Road Transport Corporation is the bedrock of public transport in Rajasthan. Established in 1964, RSRT aims to “offer low fares for passengers everyday” who are traveling within Rajasthan. Their reach is enormous, carrying nine hundred thousand passengers each day. The blue busses are ubiquitous and a staple of the Rajasthani landscape. However, they are known simply in Rajasthan as “roadways”.
Equally and arguably lesser known is the “tempo”. Tempos take their name from the German company formally known as Vidal and Sohn Tempo-Werke. Tempos come in a wide variety of forms, some are large auto rickshaws but most are multi-purpose vehicles with three rows of seats, without any doors. The vehicles when completely full can hold as many as fifteen people.
In my city of Ajmer, they travel along eleven pre-determined routes, and they are the only form of public transport that consistently reaches my village. There are a series of stops and when the driver determines that there are enough customers in the vehicle only then will he move to the next destination.
If it were not for the work of tempo drivers and bus drivers, people with disabilities would have an even greater hill to climb in their search for dignified employment. So, here’s to planes, trains, and automobiles but also to tempos, and to roadways!
