Delhi Metro on right track with free travel for women
Earlier this month, India’s Aam Aadmi Party, which holds power only in New Delhi but is considered one of the most progressive governments in the country, mooted a radical proposal for the capital. It announced that in a few months it will make travel on the Delhi Metro, India’s largest public transport system, free for women.
The news immediately set off a storm of protest, with some opinion-makers accusing the government of unfairly favoring women and rival politicians suggesting the party was providing a sop to female voters ahead of the next election in New Delhi next year.
Economists, meanwhile, accused the government of fiscal recklessness, pointing out that the move will cost the exchequer close to $215 million in subsidies each year, provide a needless freebie to many middle-class women who can afford the fare, and require a complicated new management system to separate travelers by gender (which will itself bring up the question of whether gender is an absolute binary).
Policymakers flagged the unintended consequences of making public goods free for some users, most importantly the “free rider problem,” or the overconsumption that usually occurs whenever a service has no cost associated with it.
Even the former Delhi Metro chief E. Sreedharan wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking him to reject the proposal.
None of these objections to the proposal is unreasonable. But neither is it true that the rules of economics and public policy are set in stone and universally true everywhere; they must always be weighed with regard to social contexts and in the light of what trade-offs are potentially available.
I am a New Delhi resident myself and, no, I don’t support the government’s proposal. But I am fascinated by the thought experiment that it sets up, and would consider a pilot version of the scheme be implemented for, say, two months. There are many ways the move could be a progressive one.
Let’s begin with the question of access. It is worth considering some revealing statistics about gender, public space and the use of public goods in modern Indian cities. For instance, women comprise about half the population of any society, but a recent study by Rahul Goel, a social scientist at the University of Cambridge, found that only 20 percent of all metro trips in New Delhi (and only 25 percent in Bengaluru) are made by women.
Women taking the metro in large numbers could lead, in time, to ever more women walking on the street without fear.
Chandrahas Choudhury
When one considers that public space and public transport in New Delhi are widely considered to be unsafe for women, and that the Delhi Metro is perceived to be the safest mode of travel, it becomes evident that encouraging women to use the service would likely have a vital knock-on effect on the emergence of women from domestic space to public and work spaces. (Women’s participation in the labor force in India is not only one of the lowest in the world, but also has been declining in recent years.)
Further, there is a place where gender and economics intersect in this proposal. Given that the metro is about twice as expensive as the next available public transport option (usually a bus or shared auto-rickshaw), it is likely that tens of thousands of lower-middle-class women in New Delhi who work as domestics, helpers, nurses and cleaners avoid the metro only for reasons of price — even though they know it is safer and faster.
Making the metro free for women would not only encourage take-up of the service by an extremely vulnerable class of citizens (perhaps thereby also reducing policing costs), but would also drastically improve women’s access to and ownership of an important public resource in a city.
And neither should one believe, or require, that all metro trips made by women have some economic motive in order to justify the cost. Regular participation in, and hassle-free access to, public space should be the right of every citizen; having this experience builds confidence and social trust among women, trains men and women to engage with each other in a neutral fashion in public space, and reshapes the social dynamics of urban life.
Should the alarmists among policymakers have their worst fears realized, and the Delhi Metro be swamped by women seeking joyrides from one end of the line to another, this in itself would be a salutary reminder to society that women are not naturally drawn to domestic and private space. Given a choice, they, too, want to engage fully with the world. Women taking the metro in large numbers could lead, in time, to ever more women walking on the street without fear.
Seen this way, the New Delhi government’s step is a radical proposal to create social capital. The economists are not wrong in suggesting the scheme probably comes at too high a cost. But perhaps those costs could be cut by making the scheme opt-in rather than opt-out, requiring all women who wish to use the metro for free to register for the scheme.
As for all those men who may not find a seat, or standing space, on the metro — well, it won’t hurt us to take the bus for a while until we can learn to live and let live in the city.
- Chandrahas Choudhury is a writer based in New Delhi. His work also appears in Bloomberg View and Foreign Policy. Twitter: @Hashestweets
