Women-Only Cab Services in India Offer Safe Option for Women Travelers

When Rita Marak was planning her first solo trip to Kozhikode in the southern Indian state of Kerala, she was apprehensive about her safety. In her hometown, Guwahati, she had had experiences of being unnecessarily touched by men while using public transport. However, after she landed at the airport in Kerala, she was relieved to be able to hire a cab with a woman driver from She Taxi, a cab service meant exclusively for women.

“It was 10 p.m. when I landed, and I had a good experience with the woman driver. If it would’ve been a male driver at that hour, I would have felt a bit insecure. I would have been fearful that some unforeseen incident could have happened,” Marak says.

Violence against women has been a chronic issue in India for many years. A 2013 travel survey found that 94% women worry about their safety when traveling alone in India. In 2018 Thomson Reuters Foundation ranked India at the top of the most dangerous countries for women in the world. According to government data, a rape is committed every 15 minutes in India. In 2012, the gang rape and murder of a young woman in a moving public bus in Delhi sent shock waves throughout the world.

In the context of this ongoing tide of violent crimes against women, the government and other stakeholders felt that women-only cab services could be one tool to improve women’s safety. They would make women travelers feel safer on Indian roads while empowering women drivers at the same time. Through a combination of government and nonprofit initiatives, several cab services (such as Sakha Cabs, Taxshe, She Taxi, SheCab Dehradun, Go Pink Cabs, Priyadarshini Taxi) were created where cabs are driven by women and meant exclusively for women passengers. Dovely is a bike taxi alternative launched last year for women in the city of Hyderabad. Personal safety apps like Mysafetipin, Himmat, Raksha, and Shake2Safety were launched as well.

“I think it’s important for women to have these services because we may need to travel late due to work or emergencies. This also gives agency and employment to women drivers, which I like,” says Shweta Sharan, a writer and educationist who has traveled in Go Pink Cabs in Bangalore.

Sakha Cabs, in collaboration with Azad Foundation, provides women-only cab services in the Indian cities of Jaipur, Delhi, Indore, and Kolkata, while training women from marginalized groups to make them professional chauffeurs. Similarly, SheCab Dehradun is an initiative of Saheli Trust, which works in training and empowering women.

These women drivers are often first-generation professionals from their families and face stigma, violence, and abuse in their homes. Myths like “Women can’t drive” and “Women cannot be independent” are rampant in their communities. It’s challenging for them to fight the stigma and perform their driving duties while being pressured to keep on doing the unpaid caregiving and other household chores like cooking and cleaning.

“We’re training women to drive and are relaunching post-COVID. It is very difficult to break the stereotype that women can also take up driving as a career. The biggest issue is to find women and convince them to drive. As there’s no work-sharing at home, even if a woman is a professional driver, she has to finish all her tasks at home before leaving for work,” says Shruti Kaushik, founder of SheCab Dehradun.

Vandana Suri, founder of Taxshe, agrees that it’s challenging to find women who wish to take up driving professionally. Most women from underprivileged communities feel that driving is a man’s job. Taxshe conducts women’s driving training programs at Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Gurugram, and their cab services run in Bengaluru. “These women have always been told that they are supposed to be a maid or a cook. They don’t look at driving as a career option at all,” she says.

Women drivers who train with driving schools to become professional chauffeurs need to break barriers at several levels to reach that point. Once they start earning, they attain an independence they might never have imagined for themselves. “Women have been able to invest in their homes, buy plots, construct homes, give good quality education to their children, and buy household gadgets that can help ease their burden,” says Meenu Vadera, founder of Sakha Cabs.

The demand for these female-driven cabs has been increasing over the years, as many women prefer them for their safety. However, since the number of such cabs is small, these services do not yet have apps, unlike their counterparts like Ola Cabs or Uber. Most bookings are done via a phone call, WhatsApp texts, or filling in a form on a website. “There are currently between 200 to 250 professional women drivers in India, and it’s a nascent industry,” Suri says.

Although there’s growing demand for these services, scaling up has been difficult for them. Suri feels that money has been a very big challenge as investors do not want to invest in these businesses. “When we’re talking about women and women empowerment, it’s a gendered issue; the funders are all men,” she says.

Most investors don't see this sector as a business opportunity and aren’t willing to invest in social change because they believe it might not give them good returns.

“When Uber came into the market and we spoke to them, they said, ‘We want 50,000 women’! While 50,000 women might happen at some point, in the meanwhile, a lot needs to change right from the family level itself. Also, not all the roads are illuminated well and women generally do not prefer to go out alone at night. There are hardly any public washrooms available for long stretches of the road, or enough shelter homes for women,” Vadera says. There has to be investment in all these areas to make more women take up driving professionally.

Despite these challenges, the founders are hopeful about the future. Some state governments have offered support for women-only driving services in the last few years. Governments in New Delhi, Telangana, Kerala, and West Bengal states have taken steps to popularize professional driving among women. “Every step in history, whether it’s education, entry into STEM subjects, local governance, voting rights … everything has been a challenge for women, but there is greater awareness now,” Vadera says.

Suri feels that one day investors will look at this as a profitable investment opportunity. Until then, women-only cab service in India is a budding, evolving industry.