Fare-free programmes have been piloted all over the world, and Indian cities have seen an uptake in recent years as well, with the feature that this benefit is extended to only women citizens. The national capital, New Delhi was the first to offer fare-free rides for women in the city’s buses in 2019. The state of Tamil Nadu piloted its Zero-Ticket Bus Travel (ZTBT) scheme for women in the state capital Chennai in 2021 and has since extended it to other urban areas. Evaluations of these programmes show that low-income women overwhelmingly benefit from these schemes and report positive relationships with independent mobility, access to economic opportunities, and human dignity. Since the last year, Chennai has constituted a “Gender & Policy Lab”, with the goal to mainstream gender in the city’s functioning, through a safety audit of transport infrastructures in the city, and other ways to improve women’s active mobility and transit usage. However, it is essential to place such women’s empowerment moves in a larger landscape of policymaking that relies on “expert-citizens” (Lopez & Montero, 2018) and “trendy urbanists” (Whitney, 2022) to co-constitute progressive agendas involving infrastructured safety, increased walkability or bike-ability, rapid, emission-free, and noiseless mobility, in line with a globalised aesthetic of the neoliberal city. There are also other urban experimental efforts such as Urban Living Labs underway in Indian cities: they espouse mobility innovation through infrastructural upgrades like electric mobility, “comfortable” mass transit, complete streets, and bike lanes when a majority of urban dwellers are captive in low carbon mobilities due to issues of access and/or affordability. This paper proposes that as Indian cities roll out programmes for women’s mobility, they also need to contend with contradictions in their citizenry and be wary of infrastructural solutionism (Schwanen et al., 2011) that has pervaded epistemological approaches.

Sreelakshmi Ramachandran
PhD Student, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

 
ID Abstract: 279