What to Pay a Rickshawalla?

In the two days that we’ve been here we’ve hired six or eight rickshawallas to give us rides into Gulshan 2, the perpetual traffic jam/market area where most of the Baridhara neighborhood residents do their shopping. The ride one way takes 10-15 minutes during which some 80 lb bean pole of a Bangladeshi is pumping the pedals for all he’s worth while dodging oncoming cars and busses and rickshaws and soldiers with guns and trying not to fall into the crater sized potholes in the pavement or run over the beggar with his elephantitis afflicted legs sticking out into the street or get to close to the reeking heap of garbage with the little kid picking through it. When we reach our destination the inevitable question arises, what do we pay him? What is the ride worth? The going rate seems to be about 10 taka. That’s what Sujit our housekeeper or Shakil Jen’s language teacher/assistant would pay, which amounts to approximately 14 cents. But what if there are two people on the rickshaw? Or three? Should you pay more? How much more? What if you change your mind about where you’re going partway through the ride and cause the rickshawalla to take a slightly longer route than he would have chosen? Taking all these things into consideration we’ve paid anywhere from 10-60 taka. Every time we pay, the rickshawalla looks at us like we’ve just broken his balls. How could we give him so little? He had to take us the long way round, he got hassled by a cop on our behalf for taking an illegal shortcut, the ride was sooo long… Each time I feel his pain. He does have it hard. Harder than Jen or I will likely ever be able to relate to. Neither of us would work so hard for so little. But if the going rate is 10 taka, are we displaying our social incompetence by paying more? Shakil told us this afternoon, “never pay more than fifteen.” Fifteen is an awkward number for us. We have 10’s and 20’s but no 5’s yet. So we’ve basically settled on 20 taka per ride or 1.4 cents per minute per person.