Iran war bombs Sangvi village’s prosperity

In December 2019 Subhash Bikkad, 50, a truck driver with a Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar-based transport company for two decades, drove himself to a loftier highway.

“Two friends and I jointly floated our own transport company and bought three trucks and containers. All of us were from the same village and had driven trucks all over. A Pune-based friend helped us, standing as guarantor.”

That marked the beginning of an astonishing driver-to-owner journey. Not just for Bikkad and his partners, but for 80 young men from his village Sarni Sangvi. That meant in this village of 1,460 people, perhaps every fourth household was in the trucking business. Sarni Sangvi is a twin village in drought-prone Beed district’s Kaij tehsil.

By 2025 Sarni Sangvi became a village of trucks and truck containers (also called shipping or cargo containers). Together, those 80 men own 400 trucks and loading containers. Business grew briskly, with some of the country’s biggest transport firms outsourcing work to them. Many rode to success on each other’s credit guarantees. And, sarpanch Sunil Kedar told PARI: “We celebrated Diwali performing a puja of all trucks in the fields.”

The truck-container was the new village deity.

But today, a lot of those trucks and containers are stranded at destination points, or along some routes. We found very few of them in the village. The US-Israel war on Iran has helped puncture Sarni Sangvi’s prosperity – already somewhat eroded by other factors including multiple and growing road taxes.

The war, says Bikkad’s friend Hanumant Pawar, 42, “is the latest of our problems.”

Diesel – 60 rupees in 2019 – now costs 100 rupees a litre, thanks to scarcity – and panic buying brought on by the war. With unofficial rationing in place, it’s hard to get enough. Pawar, who owns 15 trucks and transports mainly electronic and fast moving consumer goods all over India, is worried.

“It’s become very uneconomical,” says Bikkad. We see just four or five trucks with large containers parked near his office. “Toll prices are high, diesel shortages hurt our transport; some of our trucks are stranded in different places due to diesel shortage,” he told PARI at his Sangvi office. Driver salaries, stagnant freight charges, and other difficulties abound. Maintenance costs are escalating.

“You won’t believe it,” says Hanumant Pawar, “but we pay 40,000 rupees in road toll tax on a single trip from Sambhajinagar (erstwhile Aurangabad) to Bengaluru and back. For that trip, we get 55,000 rupees as freight charges, but spend 60-70,000 rupees in expenses, including fuel costs, driver salaries, their food and other, miscellaneous costs.” Pawar points out that even before the Iran conflict, India’s own policies were hurting small businesses.

The war on Iran came as a crippling blow atop those earlier expenses, hitting them on diesel costs. Apart from the sarpanch, we could only meet Bikkad and Pawar. Most of the others were out dealing with the new challenges.

Sangvi is predominantly inhabited by the Vanjari community classified as Nomadic Tribe in Maharashtra, whose main occupation has been cane cutting. Tens of thousands of families across Marathwada migrate every winter to cut cane in the sugar belt and work as footloose labour at the sugar factories. Bikkad and Pawar’s parents did that for years. But the two friends themselves, as teenagers, went to Sambhajinagar searching for work.

With little education, lots of hard work, and a fair degree of risk-taking, the truck driver-owners of Sangvi had by 2025 overcome poverty, illiteracy, ended years of migrating for work, bought farmland, and built good homes. They bought more trucks to expand their operations. Which in turn created more jobs for truck drivers, helpers and other office staff for young men and women from Sangvi and nearby villages.

But alongside came a slew of policies, new taxes and tolls, pushing up costs. In 2019, a truck and container cost 19 lakh rupees. Today: 27 lakh rupees. Sangvi’s vehicles are mostly financed by banks and private financial institutions on seven-year equated or ‘easy monthly instalments’ (EMIs). The instalments are no longer ‘easy.’

When Pawar started the business, a single truck would make a profit of up to 1.5 lakh rupees in a month. Almost 10-15 times the salary he’d have earned as a truck driver. More trucks, longer trips, brisk business, meant that much more profit. Now they’re losing money on almost every trip.

Bikkad and Pawar, who once inspired young men in Sangvi, are now advising them that “this is not a good time to enter this business. Government policies, especially taxes, are not helpful.”

And the war in Iran has come as the proverbial last straw on the truck-container’s back.