Outraged by reports of women raped in taxis, a Bengaluru-based woman did the only thing that she thought she could do: start an all-woman taxi service to ensure the safety of women passengers and drivers.
“Many Indians woke up to rapes in the country following the 2012 Nirbhaya incident. Then we realised rapes were being committed in cabs until finally there was a newspaper headline stating these assaults would not have happened had a woman been driving — that started the whole thing,” says Vandana Suri, a Bengalurean whose cab company, Taxshe, caters exclusively to women and child passengers.
Experts say things came to a head in October 2014, when Uber driver Shiv Kumar Yadav was charged with raping a 25-year-old woman executive in Delhi. This resulted in a flurry of media reports on rapes. A 2016 study by Harvard University revealed the word “rape” or “gang rape” appeared about 800 times a week across four major Indian dailies, reflecting not only increased public awareness and interest but also an increasing number of sex crimes, including at least eight high-profile incidents of taxi-related sexual impropriety including a June 8, 2018 incident in Bengaluru when a 26-year-old architect travelling to the airport was molested.
According to Vandana, these incidents show that the taxi industry is in need of a reformation and a greater influx of women drivers. “In the whole of India right now, across six or seven cab companies, there are just 200 women drivers. This needs to change,” she explains.
“Using women drivers is one practical way of curbing potential sex assaults on the road,” she adds.
Of the woman cabbies interviewed, some of whom were single mothers and nearly all were underprivileged, few could recount specific incidents of abuse they had witnessed on the job, although they attributed this to their new roles as protectors of women and child passengers under their watch.
35-year-old Yashoda, a single mother and former tailor, said the drivers' job empowered her in ways she could not have imagined. Not only was she now educated in self-defence, her legal rights and ways to navigate the system, she knows how to deal with people from various backgrounds. “When I was a housewife and tailor, people just saw me as anyone else. Now that I can drive a car and own my own vehicle, they respect me — even male taxi drivers,” she says.
Taxshe was formed in January 2015 under incubation from NSRCEL. According to Vandana, the company has seen nearly Rs 70 lakh investment from family and friends, with tech companies and foundations contributing Rs 1.5 cr in CSR.
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