His recent interest is 'Trike', basically a three wheeled Cycle. He has built one such trike in his workshop which now is successfully running on the roads of Bangalore.
Riding it is an experience in itself. One thing that was particularly of interest to me is the very fact that it starts to looking at the design of a peddle driven vehicles in a fresh light and new perspective.
This is essential in Indian context, where a large number of commuting is still carried out by peddle driven vehicles like Bicycles, Tricycle-rickshaws, Carts etc.
These vehicles are predominantly used by people from lower economic strata of society. Even though bicycle is perhaps most commonly used mode of transport till recently not much design work has been done on this form in India.
The same is true for Tricycle-rickshaw. Some work has been done on improvement and development of Peddle-driven Rickshaw at IIT-Delhi, IIT-Kanpur but nothing has made any dent.
Jabbarbhai, a Rickshaw-puller himself has done some very interesting work in development of design for Rickshaw, and is looking at taking the idea to lot more Rickshaw-pullers.
The work done by Vijay shows a way to address the design problem of peddle driven vehicles, this will probably inspire some further work by Vijay himself or others like him to do much needed work in the arena of vehicle design for peddle driven vehicles.
