I see so many e-rickshaws and auto-rickshaws on the road, but they're all run by individual drivers. Why don't companies run them like they run cabs or airlines?

Because Indian law has treated the rickshaw as a poor man’s livelihood, not a business to be built at scale. An airline may own a fleet, lease aircraft, hire pilots, and run a branded service. Rickshaws have long been governed by the opposite rule: one vehicle, one driver, one living, with the state working hard to stop any owner from controlling many vehicles.

The idea started with cycle rickshaws. Delhi’s 1960 rules let a man keep or ply a cycle rickshaw only if he owned it himself and held a licence, and no one could hold more than one. Punjab followed in 1976. The reason offered was welfare: richer owners were buying rickshaws and renting them to poor pullers, who did the hard work while paying a fixed daily rent. In the 1980s the Supreme Court accepted this logic and upheld the owner-puller rule.

The model bred its own troubles. Delhi’s licence cap began at 750 rickshaws, rose to 20,000 in 1975, and reached 99,000 by the time of the Manushi case. Once licences turned scarce, they turned valuable. The poor migrant who could not buy a rickshaw or arrange the papers still had to rent one, only now informally. In 2010, the Delhi High Court in Manushi Sangathan v. Government of Delhi struck down the owner-puller rule and the cap, holding that it blocked poor workers from earning rather than protecting them.

Auto-rickshaws walked the same road. Autos need permits, and in Delhi the permits were capped. Later notices record the Supreme Court raising the three-seater ceiling from 55,000 to one lakh. Scarcity made permits dear. In the late 1990s a new auto with permit ran to around ₹1 to 1.5 lakh. A decade of scarcity later, the same package reportedly cost ₹4 to 4.5 lakh, with the permit alone worth roughly ₹3 lakh of that. In Kolkata a permit that officially cost about ₹15,000 changed hands in the black market for around ₹1.5 lakh.

So the rule never really killed the middleman. It swapped the visible fleet company for the informal financier, the permit-holder, the union, and the rental operator. Delhi eventually admitted as much. In 2016 it allowed auto owners to rent vehicles to drivers, since many were already doing it in the shadows.

E-rickshaws briefly broke the pattern. Parliament legalised them in the 2015 Motor Vehicles amendment, and in 2016 the Union government exempted them from the ordinary permit requirement, making entry far easier than in the auto sector. Then the old instinct returned. Delhi’s recent model proposes registration in the driver’s name alone, one e-rickshaw per person, again to stop operators from owning many and renting them out.

Some firms did try to build organised electric three-wheeler fleets. SmartE reportedly grew from 30 vehicles to around 1,000 across Delhi NCR and raised ₹100 crore from Mitsui. Ola announced plans for 10,000 e-rickshaws. Oye Rickshaw raised about $13.2 million. But a fleet model needs three things: the freedom to own many vehicles, the freedom to hire drivers who do not own them, and stable rules to operate under. Rickshaw regulation has made all three hard.

There is a real worry underneath these rules. A driver renting by the day may owe the owner even when earnings are thin, the vehicle breaks down, or the police stop him, and a fleet owner can squeeze a worker. But banning fleet ownership is a blunt answer to that worry. Many poor workers rent precisely because they cannot afford to buy. Insist that only owners may drive, and you shut out the asset-poor worker the rule claims to shield.

That is why rickshaws do not look like airlines. The law has treated them as units of poverty relief rather than ordinary transport, and the record of that choice is mixed at best: fewer formal companies, more informal finance, more scarcity rents, and less organised investment in maintenance, safety, charging, and insurance.