Case Study

My new life started with a rickshaw ride

27 Nov. 2025

A rickshaw ride through a chaotic Indian city proved to be the beginning of a life-changing journey for Kirit. 

The driver’s calmness in steering his fragile vehicle through the crush of traffic has become a metaphor for the way Kirit helps people who have been through the criminal justice system to build new lives. 

It also proved to be the inspiration for a book called The Happy Rickshaw Driver in which the fictional hero explains that the secret to negotiating the roads was to forget all the vehicles behind him – that traffic was gone, he was only looking forwards. 

“In life, people tend to spend too much time dwelling on how the past will affect their future,” says 59-year-old Kirit, “particularly those who have been in prison.” 

His job as a Custody Peer Mentor Coordinator for the Ingeus CFO Evolution programme in the East Midlands sees him visiting HMP Ranby to talk to prisoners about the benefits of becoming a peer mentor, either in prison or, following release, by volunteering for Ingeus’ seven-week mentoring course that Kirit helps to run. 

He explains: “We aim to show people they can turn their past into a positive future, using their experience of the criminal justice system to demonstrate it is possible for anyone to turn their life around if they want to.” 

After his successful dance fitness company ended abruptly due to Covid, Kirit first became a Prison Officer and then moved to Ingeus to play a greater role in people’s rehabilitation. 

It was when he popped his head round the door of an Ingeus meeting room that his life took another new turn and cemented the thoughts inspired by that rickshaw driver. 

“I heard this chap on stage telling how he had 97 convictions spanning 25 years but one day he joined the Ingeus peer mentoring programme. Now he was supporting people with similar backgrounds to his own to rebuild their lives. It seemed to me to be perfect rehabilitation. 

“I haven’t been in prison, but I have been homeless and through financial crises following failed businesses, and I grew up in areas of Birmingham where crime was prevalent. I can understand what some of our clients have been through. 

“When I started working on the peer mentoring course, I based it on a topic I called ‘Stop The Noise’ – the ‘noise’ being all the barriers that people face in changing their lives. I focused on how they could stop that noise and make better choices. 

“Now I’m including those principles to write another book – a manual showing how to deal with different types of stress.” 

He adds: “Ingeus has been very supportive in my progression and has allowed me to use my own lived experience in the development of the peer mentor programme. The content is still delivered as developed by Ingeus, but I have my own way of presenting it.  

“Ingeus genuinely wants to help people realise they have something positive to offer, and those people who take that message on board can then pay it forward to others, and so it goes on.”