Victorias may ride into sunset, finally

Mumbai’s iconic horse-drawn Victorias may finally go into the pages of history. The Maharashtra cabinet on Monday approved a plan to rehabilitate these horse buggy owners as hawkers with seed money or give them a lump sum as one-time settlement.

The courts have asked for the buggies, which have been running on the streets since colonial times, and have also featured in movies like CID starring Dev Anand, to be phased out and the families to be rehabilitated. The silver-coloured horse carriages, which are also decorated and lit up, are used by tourists for joyrides at sites like Nariman Point but have been blamed by animal rights groups for maltreating horses.

Sources said these stakeholders, which include 91 Victoria owners and 130 drivers, will be offered the option of taking a hawking license with an amount of Rs 1 lakh as seed funding or choose a Rs 3 lakh one-time settlement. The BMC and NGOs will be asked to care for the horses and dispose of or sell them off outside Mumbai.

However, Victoria owners, who claimed that around 800 families were directly and indirectly dependent on the trade for employment, said the compensation was meagre. “We hope that hawking licences will be given in areas where the municipal corporation staff will not harass us,” said a Victoria owner who plies his buggies at Gateway of India and Nariman Point. He sought that Victoria owners and drivers be allowed to ply their carriages during marriages, processions and religious and cultural festivals like Ganesh utsav, Navratri and Shiv Jayanti.

“We are illiterate and this is our ancestral profession. We know little else except this… But, we are poor, who will support us except the almighty,” he lamented, admitting that the compensation package offered to them was meagre.

The state government had set up a sub-committee under finance minister Sudhir Mungantiwar to decide on the issue.

Advocate Ambika Nijjar, legal advisor, People for Animals, welcomed the government’s decision and pointed to how Mumbai’s roads had no place for these horses. Nijjar said these horses suffered from medical conditions and died a painful death because of plying on concrete roads. She added that people, who owned just one or two horses wanted to opt out of this “undependable livelihood,” and choose better ones.

Analysis

Though the inhuman conditions in which these horses are made to work cannot be denied, a thought must be spared for the plight of the Victoria drivers and owners for whom the trade is the only source of livelihood. Before the phase out, these stakeholders must be re-skilled and gainfully rehabilitated in other professions. The Bombay High Court had ordered a ban on these Victorias in June 2015.