It was while drinking my morning tea in Govindghat, Uttarakhand, that I saw the massive bamboo basket with thick straps. Curious, I asked the shopkeeper what it was for. His answer stopped me mid-sip. Humans carry other humans in it, he said. Up the mountain. They call it a pithu.
I was there to trek to Ghangaria, nine kilometres up, where you rise from 5,500 feet to over 10,000. Since there are no motorable roads, everything comes in on foot. The climb is steep, relentless. I carried my own backpack, nearly 10 kg, refusing a mule. I struggled, feeling the weight of every gram with each step. So, I understood exactly what that climb demands.
What I saw on the trail was unsettling. Grown men, women, and children, all able-bodied, sat inside baskets strapped to another man’s back, carried up like luggage. The carriers wore no proper trekking shoes. Many had no water. They paused breathless, while we offered them ours. I’d guess the people being carried weighed 65 kg or more. I watched one man trudge upward, bent nearly double, each step looking like his last for the day.
What complicated the situation was that the pithus weren’t forced into this. They touted actively, walking alongside trekkers, calling out, asking if they could carry a bag, a person, anything. This wasn’t forced labour. It was a trade, offered willingly, sought out and competed for.
Ghangaria stays open only four months a year. The pithus come for this brief season, when tourists flood in, to earn what they can before the mountain shuts them out again.
One part of me was angry with the people being carried: why come on a trek if you cannot walk up the trail yourself, and have to be carried? But another part pulled back. Who was I to call a man’s willing, sought-after livelihood degrading, when he was the one asking for the work? My indignation had nowhere to land. It reminded me of hand-pulled rickshaws, banned in several places on the same grounds: one human hauling another for money has no place in a just society, no matter who is asking for the work.
I said as much to a local in Ghangaria. He shrugged. ‘At least they make money,’ he said. I pushed back. Surely the government could create other jobs. He was educated himself, he told me. There simply weren’t jobs to be had. This region is landslide-prone, cut off for months, brutal to reach. We ourselves had been stranded on the road for 16 hours while getting back. Building anything here means fighting the mountain itself.
I don’t have an answer. What I have is a basket I can’t unsee, and a question that got harder, not easier, once I realised these men were choosing this work, chasing it, and competing for it. It would be simple to call the pithu system exploitation and demand it end. It is less simple to ask what happens to the men who need that four-month season to survive the other eight.
I do know this: when the only dignified choice on offer is hauling a stranger up a mountain or having no income at all, the problem is never the man in the basket. It is everything that leaves him no better option.
Instagram: @preeti.shenoy
