As she carefully pulls out her bus from the depot, N* waves at the man who squeezes fresh orange juice for her each morning before she starts her shift at 6 am. Her Delhi Transport Corporation uniform of shirt and pants are freshly pressed, her hair is pulled into a neat bun, and her lipstick is in place. She touches the wheel with a quiet prayer and then she’s off.
N’s come a long way from when she first began driving. Back then, she was recovering from a broken arm after yet another beating by her husband. These, she tells me, were routine at her marital home where her in-laws would shrug: No big deal.
When she found out that her minor daughter and son had also been abused by the family while she was out tending to a sick relative, N decided it was time to leave. There was a showdown at home but she walked out, kids in tow, arm in plaster, head high.
“I took whatever work came my way, cleaning people’s houses,” she says. Then a friend told her about an organization that teaches women how to drive so that they can get better-paying jobs and that’s how she landed up at Azad Foundation.
It was tough. She couldn’t afford to quit work but she couldn’t miss her classes either. And there were the kids to look after. It took her seven attempts to clear her driving test (“my mind was always somewhere else,” she explains) and get a job as a driver with Sakha, an all-women’s taxi service. In 2022, when the Delhi government’s Aam Aadmi Party announced a scheme to get more women drivers on the road, she decided to make the switch to driving a bus.
Being in charge, she says, changed her. “When I’m in the front seat, I’m not a woman driver or a man driver. I’m a driver responsible for the safety of all my passengers. I no longer feel alone because I can see other people.”
Sometimes, a woman passenger might come and stand near her seat and N can tell with a sideways glance that she looks worried. “Just a word of reassurance from one woman to another to tell her, ‘I see you’ is enough,” she says.
I’m not using N’s name because she has not told her colleagues about her marital troubles or her ongoing case against her husband. “When I come to work, I want to be treated as an equal. And so far, I’ve been lucky that my colleagues give me a lot of respect and have never looked down on me.”
The benefits of having more women drivers in a city that is regarded as one of the most unsafe in the world are obvious. More women as drivers, conductors and marshals—the day I drove with N, all three were women—and of course women passengers, thanks to a bus fare waiver, instils confidence amongst women.
There’s another benefit. Public spaces, from Parliament to parks and from the judiciary to transport, are monopolized by men. Seeing more women in the bus, as passengers and drivers, normalizes the idea that women have a right to and belong to public spaces.
There’s a third, less tangible benefit and it is this: The transformation of the lives of women like N. “If you see my old photographs,” she laughs. “You won’t even recognize me. I used to be scared of everything.”
Driving is not a skill traditionally taught to women who are more likely to learn tailoring, pickle and papad making and the like—labour-intensive, low-paying work that keeps them stuck at home.
Teaching women to drive breaks traditional gender stereotypes about what is appropriate work for women. It also leads to well-paying jobs. In many cases, women drivers—whether they are driving buses or taxis—are the primary earners in their families, finds an impact assessment report of the various Azad Foundation programmes that have since 2008 trained 3,857 women, of whom 2,176 work as professional drivers.
Training modules include the basics of driving and also gender and patriarchy, legal rights, self-defence and first aid. “What does it mean in practice and conceptually to have the steering wheel in your hand?” says Rukmini Sen of B.R. Ambedkar University who along with Krishna Menon wrote the report. “It’s not just learning to use Google Maps or digital payment apps but, in a larger sense, learning to navigate your way around the city.”
There are challenges to this in a city filled with testosterone-fueled male drivers. But sometimes the outcomes are unexpected. Many times, N says, drivers will honk and shout abuses if she doesn’t immediately let them overtake, but when they do and see that she is a woman, many will apologize. “Sorry madam, I didn’t realise a woman was driving the bus,” they say.
There is another benefit to having more women drivers on the road: Creating role models for younger women. N tells me that when her brother died, leaving two young children, she persuaded his wife to learn to drive so that she could get a good job.
“When my daughter is older,” she continues. “I want her to learn to drive because driving gives a woman confidence to get around the city and also her life. It teaches us to live with dignity and without fear.”
