Raipur

From Mumbai, I travelled to Chhattisgarh to continue my research on the truck art of India.

Today I came to Raipur— the capital of Chhattisgarh as well as an important business city of central India. I met Engineer Bhupinder Singh Walia (Director, Lucky Engineering and Fabrications Pvt. Ltd.) at Transport Nagar, Tatibandh, Raipur. Mr. Walia started his business in 1995. During the initial days of his business he was a truck operator and later progressed to building trucks. He spoke about the improvement in technology and various ways in which the truck bodies were getting better with time. According to him, there is an increase in awareness in the industry and technology of building truck bodies. “The truck bodies are getting more effective in terms of cost, strength and aesthetics.” said Mr Walia.

According to him, while a truck driver drives a truck for 40 years, he spends at least 75 percent of his time in the truck. So it becomes important for the driver to decorate the truck and keep it beautiful.

In the same workshop, I met an engineer, Mr. Neeraj, who took care of building truck bodies. He showed us some prints and processes that are used to build the new truck bodies using Autocad software. I also met Mohd. Sheikh Ashraf (s/o Mohd. Sheikh Akbar) who works as a painter at Lucky Engineering and Fabrications Pvt. Ltd. His father had been in the truck painting business for over 40 years. Currently Mohd. Sheikh works with a group of 6 people and takes 3–4 days to paint 1 truck.

While I was in Raipur, I also managed to gather some video footage of trucks getting painted at Transport Nagar.

While visiting various workshops at Transport Nagar, I met Uday Sharma. The owner of a truck body-building workshop. Mr. Uday mentioned that the expense of manufacturing trucks and the cost of buying raw materials has definitely seen a rise over the years whereas his income hardly escalated with time.