THE NEW BAND WAGON

FOR SPORT, TRANSPORT, OR TO MAKE A STATEMENT— THE MANY REASONS PEOPLE ARE LEAPING INTO THE SADDLE

- Aditya Wig

A lack of public transport. An antidote to corona gloom. Or perhaps just the latest fad for the well-heeled. These are some of the reasons that bicycle shops across India are filled with exhausted owners and little else.

“Material hi nahin hai, (I’m out of stock),” shrugs Rajesh Girdhar, the owner of Cyclofit, a chain of cycle stores with four outlets across the NCR. He’s not alone in this most pleasant of business dilemmas. Several others also report absurd levels of demand. Some say they’ve done a year’s business in the past two months. Others just want their phones to stop ringing. The spike in demand is visible even at the industry level—Hero Cycles’ Pankaj Munjal recently said that the company’s order book for June was half a million cycles, up from 350,000 in June last year.

Of course, in Covid times, everything comes with a side order of irony. One such is the tale of Atlas Cycles—a name guaranteed to provoke “my first bike” reminiscences from Indians of a certain age—which shut its last factory just last month for a lack of business. Another is that cycles have recently been in the news for very sobering reasons—as in the story of Jyoti Paswan, a 15-year-old migrant girl who cycled 1,200 km back home, from Gurugram to Darbhanga, with her injured dad riding pillion.