Mainstream WeeklyAcross West Bengal, today, mobility has a new sound—the soft, electric hum of the e-rickshaws, popularly known as “toto”. The toto has become one of the most visible signs of technological change in everyday transport. Carrying passengers from villages to markets, railway stations and schools, it has expanded mobility at relatively low cost. Yet behind this transformation lies a less visible question: does the rise of the toto represent economic progress, or does it reflect an economy increasingly dependent on informal self-employment because it cannot generate enough decent and secure jobs?
Technological progress has long replaced physical effort with mechanical power, from the wheel to the Industrial Revolution. The toto belongs to this continuum, replacing human muscle with electric power. It reduces physical drudgery while making short-distance transport faster, more affordable and accessible, particularly in towns and rural areas. But technology alone cannot explain the toto revolution. The deeper story is employment.
The rise of the toto reveals a paradox of contemporary employment: technology has democratised physical mobility and occupational entry, but has not necessarily democratised economic security or upward mobility. This expansion reflects both genuine demand for affordable local mobility and the availability of a low-entry-barrier livelihood in an economy where secure employment remains limited. Requiring little formal education or specialised training, the toto offers an accessible source of immediate income for underemployed youth, returning migrants, former agricultural workers and those displaced from other informal occupations. This is where the toto paradox emerges. Its growth represents both human ingenuity and economic vulnerability. On the one hand, people are adapting to technological change and creating livelihoods for themselves. On the other, the growing dependence on informal self-employment may indicate the wider economy’s inability to generate sufficient productive, stable and dignified jobs. The toto, therefore, is more than a vehicle: it is a technological innovation, a livelihood strategy and a revealing mirror of West Bengal’s changing employment structure.
Informal interviews conducted for this article suggest that daily gross earnings can be around ₹450 on ordinary days, rising to nearly ₹1,200 during peak festival periods in some urban areas; rural earnings appear considerably lower. These figures are indicative rather than representative, but they illustrate the narrow margins within which many drivers operate. Though modest, such income supports household expenses and makes the toto an important livelihood strategy. As more workers enter the occupation, competition for passengers may intensify, particularly where demand is relatively limited. What appears as expanding self-employment at the aggregate level may therefore partly reflect the absorption of surplus labour into easily accessible informal activities. This is the heart of the toto paradox: its success in providing affordable mobility and creating livelihoods may simultaneously reveal the wider economy’s inability to generate sufficient stable, productive and upwardly mobile employment.
Most toto drivers operate outside the protection of the formal labour market, and a significant divide exists between owners and renters. Renters pay a fixed daily amount before they begin earning, making them more exposed to fluctuations in passenger demand and leaving little scope for asset accumulation. Owners, by contrast, possess an income-generating asset and have greater potential to accumulate wealth, but also bear the costs of financing, maintenance, depreciation, charging and periodic battery replacement. For both, these operating costs can substantially reduce net earnings.
The real question, therefore, is not whether a driver earns ₹450 or ₹1,200 on a particular day, but what remains after costs, how stable that income is, and whether it allows a household to withstand shocks and build assets. A person may work every day and still remain economically vulnerable. Where toto driving represents a substantial departure from a worker’s skills, qualifications and aspirations, it may also constitute a form of downward occupational mobility—an issue that becomes particularly significant in the case of educated youth discussed later.
The owner–renter divide thus exposes a deeper inequality within an occupation that appears open to all. The toto may democratise entry into work without democratising ownership of the means of earning. Limited access to affordable credit, accident insurance, social security, battery finance and maintenance support further shifts the risks of providing an increasingly important transport service onto drivers and their households. The result is a paradox at the heart of the toto economy: entry may be relatively easy, but economic security and upward mobility remain far less accessible.
The toto revolution deserves neither unqualified celebration nor condemnation. It reflects technological adaptation and livelihood creation, but also the wider economy’s failure to generate enough secure, quality jobs. When people turn to roughly ₹450-a-day work because better opportunities are scarce, livelihood creation should not be mistaken for decent employment. The toto has made West Bengal more mobile; the harder question is whether it has made the economy more secure.
The transformation also has a significant dimension of labour dignity. The growing replacement of pedal rickshaws by electric vehicles means that workers no longer have to rely to the same extent on physically exhausting labour to transport passengers. This is a welcome technological transition. But it raises a deeper question: what happens when a society creates vehicles faster than it creates decent jobs? That question becomes particularly important when the toto is seen through the lens of aspiration.
Consider Chandan Byapari (name changed), a young man from Kalyani who comes from a Scheduled Caste family. He completed a master’s degree and a B.Ed. with the ambition of becoming a schoolteacher. For his family, a regular teaching position would have represented much more than a monthly salary. It would have meant social mobility—the possibility of moving beyond generations of economic disadvantage and securing a more stable future. But years passed without the regular employment he had hoped for. Eventually, waiting became impossible. He abandoned his original ambition, bought a toto and entered the occupation. Beyond these economic realities, therefore, lies a deeper, more disquieting shift—one that concerns aspiration itself.
His story is no longer exceptional. Conversations with other drivers suggest that, in West Bengal in recent years, some educated young people have turned to toto driving after failing to find stable employment commensurate with their qualifications. For generations, education was seen as a ladder to upward mobility: a degree, particularly with a professional qualification, was expected to lead to secure employment, higher income and a better social position. When qualifications no longer translate into viable employment, however, the perceived returns to education begin to weaken.
The consequences extend beyond individual careers. If families increasingly doubt whether higher education can deliver economic mobility, some young people may choose not to pursue further studies or may leave college in search of immediate income. This can create a troubling cycle in which weak employment prospects reduce the perceived value of education, declining enrolment affects the viability of higher-education institutions, and reduced educational participation further narrows opportunities for future mobility. The growing number of vacant seats in colleges across West Bengal in recent years may therefore signal not merely an institutional problem, but a weakening link between education and aspiration.
This is why the distinction between choice and compulsion matters. Toto driving is neither an inferior occupation nor devoid of dignity; for some, it is a genuine form of self-employment and autonomy. For others, however, it may be a refuge from unemployment or a livelihood adopted after better alternatives have disappeared. In such cases, self-employment can conceal underemployment and even downward occupational mobility, particularly when educated workers move into occupations far removed from their skills and aspirations.
The irony is hard to miss. The toto enables physical movement across West Bengal’s roads, yet for some of its educated drivers it has become a symbol of stalled educational and social mobility. This connects the toto economy directly to the broader question raised earlier: being economically active is not necessarily the same as achieving economic security or moving upward.
Take Parthapratim Bhattacharya (name changed), a 43-year-old master’s degree holder in mathematics from Purulia town. For the past eight years, he has been driving a toto. Unable to find stable employment, he invested in one and made driving his livelihood. His experience reveals another dimension of the toto economy. In many parts of Bengal, caste historically shaped access to particular occupations, and manual transport work carried a strong social stigma among sections of the middle and upper castes. The toto appears to have weakened some of these occupational boundaries.
E-rickshaw driving is relatively open to people from very different social backgrounds. A Scheduled Caste youth, an upper-caste graduate, a former agricultural worker or a returning migrant can enter the same occupation. In the drivers’ accounts I encountered, caste appeared to matter less for entry into toto driving than it traditionally did in many caste-linked occupations, although it may continue to shape access to credit, vehicle ownership and economic security. The toto has therefore done something that markets do not always do: it has widened occupational entry even while leaving inequalities in assets and opportunities largely intact.
This distinction is important. The toto economy may be socially more open without being economically equal. A renter and an owner may occupy the same road, carry the same passengers and perform the same work, yet stand at very different points in the hierarchy of economic security. The toto can thus weaken caste-based occupational boundaries while reproducing inequalities through ownership, credit and accumulation. It democratises entry more readily than it democratises economic security. That is the deeper paradox.
The social changes associated with the toto do not stop with its drivers. Inside a toto, people from different social and occupational backgrounds routinely share the same small space. Such everyday encounters may modestly widen opportunities for social interaction, even though they do not necessarily translate into economic equality. For a few minutes, differences of caste, class and occupation become less visible. The toto has democratised mobility in two related but distinct senses: it has widened access to affordable local transport for passengers and lowered social barriers to entry into transport work. Neither, however, guarantees economic equality.
The fact that people from different caste and class backgrounds can enter the same occupation does not mean that they share the same economic future. The toto economy often provides horizontal mobility rather than upward mobility. A worker moves from construction to vending, from agriculture to transport, or from one informal occupation to another. He or she remains economically active, but does not necessarily become economically secure. The occupation changes; precarity remains.
Driving a toto is certainly less physically punishing than pulling a pedal rickshaw. It can also make transport work accessible to people who might no longer be able to undertake physically demanding manual occupations. This is an important improvement in the dignity and conditions of work. The toto also offers a degree of autonomy uncommon in many informal occupations: a driver can decide when to work, where to operate and, if the vehicle is owned, how to organise the working day.
Yet autonomy should not be confused with security. When the worker bears the risks that an employer would normally bear, self-employment can become self-managed insecurity. Without stable income, social protection, accident insurance or a realistic pathway to asset accumulation, the freedom to work can coexist with the inability to stop working. This is the central political-economy contradiction of the toto.
On one side lies genuine innovation. Totos have filled a crucial gap in West Bengal’s transport system, particularly in small towns and rural areas where buses are infrequent and conventional public transport provides inadequate last-mile connectivity. They take people to schools, colleges, markets, railway stations and health centres. For women, elderly people and low-income households, affordable door-to-door connectivity can significantly expand access to everyday economic and social opportunities.
On the other side lies the employment problem. When an economy cannot create enough stable and productive jobs, people do not simply stop working. They create their own livelihoods. The toto is one such survival strategy. Its rapid expansion therefore highlights an important limitation of employment statistics: more people may be working even when the quality and security of work are not improving at the same pace.
This distinction matters. Rising self-employment should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of expanding entrepreneurship. If educated graduates abandon professional aspirations to drive totos, workers move repeatedly between informal occupations, and increasing numbers of drivers compete for a limited local market, employment figures alone cannot capture the quality of economic opportunity. The real question is not simply whether people are working, but whether their work enables them to build assets, withstand shocks and imagine a better future.
The toto should therefore neither be romanticised as a grassroots success story nor dismissed as evidence of economic failure. Its success is real; so is the insecurity that makes the success necessary. The silent electric hum of the toto is, in this sense, both the sound of entrepreneurial resilience and the sound of an economy absorbing labour where it cannot create enough secure employment.
West Bengal’s toto boom tells two stories at once. It is a story of resilience—the ability of ordinary people to respond to economic uncertainty by creating work for themselves rather than waiting for employment to arrive. But it is also a story of deferred aspirations: people are moving faster on the roads even as many find it increasingly difficult to move upward in life. This is where the state enters the story.
The state cannot simply celebrate the growth of self-employment and leave the rest to the market. Nor should totos be treated merely as informal nuisances to be regulated whenever traffic becomes inconvenient. They have already become an integral part of West Bengal’s everyday transport economy. The question is no longer whether totos should exist, but how a rapidly expanding informal transport sector should be governed.
The first requirement is recognition. Toto drivers need to be incorporated into urban and rural transport planning through transparent registration, designated routes and parking spaces, road-safety measures, affordable finance, battery and maintenance support and access to basic social-security mechanisms. If totos are to contribute to the transition towards electric mobility, the cost and risks of that transition cannot simply be shifted onto individual drivers.
Field conversations with drivers also point to a more complicated reality. In some areas, the local administration has initiated registration, but drivers have expressed dissatisfaction with the associated charges. In some areas, drivers interviewed for this article reported making payments to local intermediaries, sometimes referred to locally as dadas, outside the formal system. These accounts suggest that where formal regulation is costly, unclear or difficult to navigate, informal authority may fill the vacuum.
This points to a less visible dimension of the toto economy: the political economy of access to the road. A driver may own or rent the vehicle, yet access to profitable routes, parking spaces, local permissions and everyday operation can depend on actors beyond the driver. The vehicle may be privately owned, but the economic space in which it operates is socially and politically negotiated. Collective organisation could therefore play an important role. Transparent and accountable forms of representation could strengthen drivers’ bargaining power with vehicle owners, financiers and local authorities, provided such organisations do not become instruments of local control or rent-seeking. Policy, accordingly, must look beyond the number of totos to questions of ownership, access, earnings, risk and security.
Yet the policy challenge extends beyond regulation. The toto phenomenon embodies a fundamental contradiction. On one side is genuine innovation: a flexible, relatively low-cost transport system that fills critical gaps in last-mile connectivity, linking villages and neighbourhoods to schools, markets, railway stations and health centres. For women, elderly people and low-income households in particular, this connectivity can make everyday, economic and social life significantly more accessible. On the other side is a structural signal about the limits of employment generation. When educated and skilled workers turn to low-return informal work because more secure opportunities are scarce, self-employment may reflect not only entrepreneurship but also constrained choice.
This is why the toto should neither be celebrated simply as a grassroots success nor dismissed as evidence of economic failure. Its proliferation represents resilience—the ability of people to respond to economic uncertainty by creating livelihoods—but it also reveals deferred aspirations, as physical mobility increasingly coexists with limited occupational and economic mobility. The toto has made it easier for people to move across space; the more difficult task is enabling them to move upward in economic life.
The future, therefore, depends on whether policy can move beyond passive tolerance towards active integration: bringing e-rickshaws into formal transport planning, ensuring transparent regulation and social protection for drivers, improving access to credit and infrastructure, and, above all, expanding productive and dignified employment opportunities. The toto will continue to move people across West Bengal’s roads. The larger challenge, however, is more demanding: can West Bengal build an economy that moves people not merely across roads, but towards the futures they once imagined for themselves?
(Author: Dr Abhijit Ghosh teaches Economics at Mahatma Gandhi College, Lalpur, Purulia (Former faculty at the A N Sinha Institute of Social Studies, Patna). Email: abhijitghosh2007[at]rediffmail.com