Putting marginalised women in the driver’s seat

Bengaluru: The moment the clock strikes nine, women who have to travel home or anywhere else by themselves begin to worry, with stress levels rising exponentially every half hour. Transport is available, autorickshaws and cabs do operate at all hours of the night, but safety is hardly a guarantee. With a growing number of horror stories, involving rapes, molestations and murders by cabbies and auto drivers, Major Shailendra Singh, a Bengaluru-based social entrepreneur, decided to do something about it. In April 2015, after over a year of ground-work, he kicked off the city’s first ever women cab service, employing exclusively women drivers. The social enterprise is an initiative of R2R Ventures, a company founded by Singh.

The idea, said Singh, first came about in 2010, when he was doing a course at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. “I wanted to give people in Bengaluru safe commuting options,” said Singh. “These were values I imbibed during my time in the army. I had to take voluntary retirement after I was injured – I felt that if I couldn’t lead my troops physically, there was no point in my continuing with that great organisation.”

After that, he had a brief stint in the corporate world and then went on to join his course at IIMB. “I heard about social enterprise and I felt that was what I wanted to do. I’m a techie, yes, but there’s more to life than this Internet of Things. I wanted to do something that would directly impact people's lives, even if it is in a small way.” That year, a woman was murdered by a cab driver when she was on her way home from work. “That's what made me think, if there are no safe commuting options for women, let the women do the driving.” It was a long shot of course, for the hurdles were many. There is a perception that women aren’t good drivers, eve-teasing on the roads is common and let’s face it, the women drivers need to be taken care of, too. Getting started meant breaking a number of societal stereotypes and the process began early in 2014. “We wanted to work with underprivileged, whether they were single, divorced or widowed. The idea was to reach out to those women who didn’t have family support,” he said.

Singh and his team began their recruitment work in villages that lie in a 100-km radius of Bengaluru. As soon as they started, they found themselves enveloped in a cloud of suspicion and distrust. “There was a lot of criticism. People wanted to know what I was doing and if my intentions were good,” said Singh. Despite having to operate on such shaky ground, he persisted.

Singh visited houses in nearby villages, spoke to families and presented them with his business model. “We started off by giving them driving classes in and around the villages, so they wouldn't have to step out of their comfort zone in the initial phases,” he explained. The girls were then brought to Bengaluru, which gave rise to another requirement. Without family support, the employees-in-training needed every basic amenity to be fulfilled by the organisation. “We provide them with shelter and food once they come here,” he said. The hostels, run and managed by the women themselves, are made as homely as possible.

“A lot of the girls were accompanied to the city by their families, who wanted to see if we were really providing what we promised and to make sure that their daughters were safe,” said Singh. The girls were given a second round of training in Bengaluru, for driving around their homes is very different from navigating the city's infamous traffic!

“Working for women empowerment is a hard job. Everybody doubts you. Also, driving is not seen as a viable profession for women, it is a very male-dominated industry. We encountered a lot of psychological and societal pressure, but we had made up our minds. When families of the girls came to visit, they could hardly believe the facilities made available to the employees,” he said.

The model is simple. Clients are accepted only on a referral basis, the cabs ply only up to 9 pm everyday and Singh prefers corporate customers. “Companies verify their employees and they also send people in groups to optimise the cab services. So there is very little chance of something untoward happening,” Singh explained. The girls are paid between Rs 15,000 and Rs 25,000 per month. “Once they can stand on their own feet financially, they are encouraged to move out of the hostel to make room for someone new,” said Singh. “Independence is the essence of the organisation and the process usually takes about six months,” he said.

The employees are provided with extensive training, including crisis management. “Eve-teasing on the roads is very common,” said Singh. Male drivers are eager to dominate their female counterparts and men often approach the cab if it is parked on the road. “The drivers have a lot of inappropriate remarks thrown at them,” said Singh. One of the women, however, has a black belt in karate and takes it upon herself to show her colleagues the basics of self defense. “The girls are also given cans of pepper spray and are taught how to handle eve-teasing. They are told how to avoid situations and how to tackle them if they cannot be bypassed,” he said.

Another situation that had to be tackled arose from the fact that a lot of the recruits came from extremely troubled, often violent backgrounds. “Several of them have been abandoned by their husbands, or widowed. One employee is a gangrape victim and another was physically abused by her father for many years,” Singh said. This required counselling that Singh or the other founding members couldn't provide, because of the gender difference. For this, they turned to volunteers - a soft skills trainer and counsellor from the Manipal Group works regularly with the girls. “A lot of the employees from my previous organisations also came forward – all the volunteers are women,” said Singh.

Random customers are not accepted, Singh doesn't want to operate like a conventional, commercially run cab service just yet. There have, however, been a couple of exceptions along the way. “A woman called me a couple of months ago and said she needed to go to the airport at 3 am. I told her we don’t do that sort of thing, but she insisted, so I said yes.” Otherwise, only corporate clients who are on board with the organisation are accepted, with pre-fixed routes. “Operating in the night is still a no-no, because it is unsafe for our drivers,” he said.

Interestingly, the services are available to men. However, in these cases, an intern-driver is sent along, to sit in the front seat. “That's the beauty of the thing for me,” said Singh. “Why should men be deprived of a safe drive home? Also, I want to show that women are just as capable as men, as drivers,” he remarked. All 15 cabs are equipped with a 24/7 tracking mechanism. “We have GPS tracking systems in every vehicle and there is a panic button that can be used in an emergency,” said Singh. Once this button is pressed, the office will be alerted immediately. “We can reach out to the nearest police station or have someone from our team reach the spot at once, whichever is sooner,” said Singh.

The service has grown so popular that women are quitting corporate jobs to join Singh’s fleet! “I have one woman working already and another two are being trained,” he said. Singh is also setting up an entrepreneurial model to cater to those women who are more financially stable. If they can afford to bring a cab, WomenCabs will take care of the rest.
Singh also hopes to branch out into one more area – employing transgenders to work as drivers. This plan is still on the backburner, however, simply because the employees have shown a certain reluctance to be a part of it. “I will eventually do it, because transgenders have more physical strength than regular women and it will enable the cabs to operate at night,” said Singh. “Even so, it's not an immediate plan, because I don't want to jeopardise what I already have.”

The organisation has its fundamental purposes, of course, to provide employment to underprivileged women and to give safe commuting options to others. However, Singh has a larger philosophical aspiration - to prove that women are just as capable as men! Any woman who is interested in joining the organisation can log on to http://womencabs.com/ for more details.