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Telling Tall Tales is a column by Tara Krishnaswamy on matters that matter.
"Many of us from Chikkaballapur who work in the Bengaluru airport have switched from using shared cabs to buses, due to Shakti,” said a woman respondent who participated in a recent study on the impact of the Karnataka government’s ‘five guarantees’ on women heads of low-income families in Bengaluru. The independent study showed Bengaluru outlying the rest of the state along many parameters on Nagarada Shakti, a free mobility scheme.
The Shakti scheme in Bengaluru is a unique beast. Unlike the rest of the state, a majority of its use by low-income women in the city is for daily work commute. It boosts jobs, livelihoods, and incomes of over a third of them, adding a quarter of them as new employees riding to work. These are the same women with eligibility for, and receiving Gruha Lakshmi money as well, as the study documents.
In Bengaluru, 62% of the survey respondents used the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) bus everyday, as compared to 17% using state-run public transport in the rest of Karnataka. Note that women who qualify as heads-of-households run their families, and are naturally in a higher age bracket, as against female students. This means that nearly two-thirds of underprivileged women in the city ride the bus to their jobs.
This is significant when viewed in conjunction with the worker-population ratio (WPR) above 15 years of age, per the Annual Report, PLFS, 2023-24. In Karnataka, rural WPR for males is 74% and females is 43%, a 31% point gap. However, urban WPR is 71% for males, similar to the rural figures, but only 27% for females, which is a 44% point gap.
Unlike rural women who may have local, part-time, paid work in agriculture and under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), lower-income urban women often need to travel for work. Despite cities offering more job and livelihood opportunities, urban female WPRhas always lagged behind rural female WPR. Commuting is one inhibitor behind the lower urban WPR.
Enter Shakti, the free mobility scheme, and 34% of the surveyed women from the lower-income strata in Bengaluru admitted to securing a brand new job or a better-paying job. This divides up thus: 26% women secured new employment due to free mobility, without which the opportunity would be financially imprudent for them, and 8% upgraded to a higher wage employment. This compares to 19% who found new or better employment across the state. This is unsurprising given the dynamism of Bengaluru's employment market.
Beyond income, an additional financial impact is that about two-thirds of the women respondents reported saving up to Rs 500 per week; 25% women reported between Rs 500 and Rs 1000 in weekly savings; and over 10%, even more. This is because the beneficiaries now use zero-ticket buses or chain rides across routes, where earlier, they would have borne the burden of walking.
When queried on the impact to their jobs of withdrawing Shakti, only 46% of the women using it to commute to work said that they would continue with their employment by paying for their rides. Nearly a quarter said that they would be forced to walk to work. This points to the flimsy levels of pay that they are forced to endure for subsistence, amounts that render bus ticket costs beyond reach. While 3% said that they would look for jobs nearby to avoid unaffordable paid commute, 8% said they would quit working altogether as it would be a net negative for them. This again points to paltry incomes.
On ease of use, 85% of the women surveyed felt that the bus stop is too far and 85% also reported that buses were overcrowded. These figures match those in the rest of Karnataka.
While male passengers may have similar complaints, ease of access and use impose additional penalties on female commuters. Both these factors determine safety and dignity for women, much more so than for men. Bus stop distance increases exposure to potentially unsafe streets, and overcrowding increases exposure to sexual harassment. These can make or break the pursuit of employment, access to health, and higher education by women. They may simply not be allowed to avail the opportunity if they reveal the travails of travel to family.
As things stand in a patriarchal society, women's paid labour, in large part, provides supplemental income to households, rather than sustenance income. This causes women's jobs and education to be seen as dispensable, and gated by external factors like the distance to the bus stop and crowded transport.
Shakti rebuffs the banal refrain of 'freebies causing laziness'; instead, free mobility has facilitated substantially more women from the lower-socio-economic strata to enter the worker population as paid labour. One can hardly recall another policy measure that provides such a significant fillip in employment of socio-economically underprivileged women.
As the current #DoubleTheBus campaign takes root, a bigger fleet, smarter routing, and a higher frequency of buses combined with zero-ticket rides for women can transform not only urban mobility but also women's participation in the workforce. In the long run, free mobility could seriously dent urban poverty and gender inequality if Shakti is not just sustained but nurtured.
Tara Krishnaswamy is a political creature with an urge to write. She is an independent policy consultant who led the 5 Guarantees study referenced here, as Senior Consultant with Lokniti-CSDS and Indus Action Initiatives.