Karnataka’s new scheme for women: A bus ride to equality

Today, women have greater mobility and much of it has greater social acceptance. But the provision of free state-owned public transport will expand the vistas of this mobility and the opportunities and choices that come with it, across the class divide. While mobility is commonsensically understood as movement between destinations in space, these destinations are always invested with social, personal, historical and cultural meanings and purposes. Thus, the personal intentions and experiences of travel are always in excess of their spatial dimension.

For women, free state transportation would mean the possibility of access or a greater regularity of access to many kinds of destinations that fulfil their emotional, economic, social and personal needs. Such journeys could take the shape of pilgrimages that provide them with spiritual resources. In a society where marriage relocates women in virilocal family structures, free access to transport systems would allow them greater proximity with their natal family through more frequent visits to their natal home. A free bus ride could also make it possible for women to break from the drudgery and monotony of their domestic routines and responsibilities. By lessening the economic burden of mobility, it would allow women greater choices with regard to the educational institutions they want to attend and the workplaces they want to enter.

The major impact will be experienced by women who belong to the economically marginalised sections of society and take on the burden of supporting their households. For that large group of women who form the unorganised work sector, whose daily sustenance of themselves and their families depends on daily travel to the cities and suburbs where they work in ill-paid jobs or sell their wares, a scheme like Shakti will allow for saving a sizeable portion of their meagre earnings. For these women, for whom travelling has become a routine part of their daily lives, it will expand the itinerary of their travel and also open up a new purpose, that is, travel for leisure.

They can now embark on journeys that are structured through the needs of leisure and pleasure. Women who formed loosely linked communities as neighbours, or more rigidly and institutionally linked groups as members of families or as fellow workers sharing a common workspace, can now come together as a community of travellers. In such a community, for brief but recurring periods, they would be freed from the demands of the kinship and institutional structures in which they are ordinarily placed, and explore possibilities of friendship and shared pleasurable activities that are otherwise disallowed to them.

Thus, a scheme like Shakti could fundamentally remap women’s imagination and experience of inhabiting the many intersections of the social/geographical/personally imagined worlds. It can provide them with the agency to explore the possibilities in enabling and fulfilling ways. Of course, the mobility of women has to contend with the nexus of patriarchal curtailments placed on them. It may be stunted and limited by their economic dependence on the male heads of their households. It may not be availed at all because of the internalisation of patriarchal restrictions by women themselves. Women may also be deterred from accessing this mobility by the threat of patriarchal backlash or the fear of male sexual predatoriness. Finally, social and institutional structures themselves may not expand and reshape themselves to accommodate this new mobility made available to women.

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But when the state supports the mobility of women by offering them the means for it, it can make significant changes in the lives of individual women and in the ways in which a society organises women’s lives and regulates their trajectories. When women travel to destinations, geographical, personal and social, of their choice, a transformation will take place that will lead to a more egalitarian and liberating society, however slow and obstructed that process may be.

The writer is professor, department of English, Mangalore University