It was a tough life, but fortune smiled on him.

"I found a friend in the city who used to live in a slum and cycle a rickshaw for a living," Mustafa, 50, told Reuters. "He gave me shelter, took me to a rickshaw owner and arranged for me to drive a rickshaw on hire."

With muscles honed by years of toil in the fields and a heart full of hope, Mustafa started pedalling the three-wheeled rickshaws and was soon making about 100 taka ($0.63) profit a day after paying the hire fee to the owner.

His wife supplemented their meagre income by working as a domestic help, and it seemed that the family's fortunes were on the up.

His two sons grew up and became rickshaw pullers too, and together the family managed to save enough to buy their own machine. Frugal living and hard work brought more every year until Mustafa's fleet now numbers 40.

"We pedalled double shifts -- day and night -- to boost our incomes. It paid off," said Mustafa, a proud member of Dhaka's estimated two-million-strong rickshaw pullers' and owners' community.

But it wasn't to last.

As Dhaka's population swelled in recent years with more rural migrants seeking a better life, so too did competition and crime.

Mustafa said his family had lost about 50 rickshaws to thieves over the last three or four years.

BUY BACK

So audacious are the thieves that once they have stolen the vehicles they contact the owners offering to sell them back.

"I bought back a few but later decided not to because such illegal trading encourages them," Mustafa said.

"But this did not stop the business as thieves managed to keep safe by paying bribes to unscrupulous policemen.

Police deny the charge. "They have built their own network and operate independently," one officer told Reuters. Police say they believe there are more than 1,000 rickshaw thieves in Dhaka, belonging to nearly 50 gangs.

They extract around 100,000 taka every day by stealing and re-selling rickshaws -- the cheapest and most common mode of transport in Bangladeshi cities.

Among the techniques they use to make off with the vehicles is administering drugs to the pullers after disguising themselves as passengers and blinding them by throwing powder in their eyes.

A recent newspaper report said the crime bosses buy a stolen rickshaw for between 500 to 1,000 taka each and then demand between 1,000 to 2,000 taka to return it to its owner.

CLEAN CITY DILEMMA

Rickshaw pullers say they also face problems due to a government drive to ease Dhaka's torturous traffic jams by banning rickshaws on many streets.

Municipal officials said the ban was part of moves to make Dhaka a "clean and beautiful city" and its roads safer for commuters.

"Rickshaws often ignore traffic rules trying to compete with motorised vehicles or find a short cut on busy roads. They are to blame for most of the accidents in the city," one official said.

Environment groups, however, support the rickshaws because they are pollution-free in a city not known for clean air.

The government says Dhaka has some half a million rickshaws, only 70,000 of them properly licensed, and the number must be cut.

But official statistics show that about 12 million Bangladeshis live entirely on income derived from the rickshaw business, so cutting the number could leave tens of thousands without food.

The World Bank recently said it would give a $7.5 million soft loan to a project for helping thousands of rickshaw pullers who have already been driven off the streets.