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PUBLIC transport anywhere in the country is a nightmare, and one can only feel sympathy for the millions dependent on it. Barring a couple of big-ticket projects in Islamabad and Lahore, there are the problems of tattered, privately owned vehicles that care as little for safety standards as they do for the traffic rules. On top of that, there is pressure posed by the millions upon millions dependent on buses, vans and rickshaws for transport.
The world offers to women a special little place of their own, though, and public transport is no different. We face all the problems that men do, plus the additional one of sexual harassment. As is well recognised, the issue is of such magnitude that women who can and want to earn, or perhaps further their education, can be disallowed by the patriarchs from doing so. And, I can’t imagine any female in this country contemplating the prospect of getting on a bus or van with anything other than anxiety.
So when on Women’s Day last week a private company inaugurated a women’s-only taxi service, it offered a choice to half of Karachi’s population that must be welcomed. Paxi Pakistan, with its fleet of pink Suzuki Every vans and Nissan Clippers, is a service for women, by women. Given the plan to make it possible to hail the cabs through a smartphone app, phone call or SMS once operations start on March 23, it should bring about much-awaited relief to those sections of the population that can afford taxi rides.
The world offers to women a special little place of their own.
And it’s not just the customers that will benefit. The press reports of the launch carried numerous accounts of the female drivers who have all kinds of educational and social backgrounds. For all these employees, the service is an opportunity to earn a livelihood, while also carving out for women a sliver more of public space.
The initiative is praiseworthy, but it is not the first. In 2012, the Lahore Transport Company launched a Pink Bus Service for women on three routes in the city. But a year later, two of these buses stopped plying their routes on the complaint of running into losses because there wasn’t a sufficient passenger load. The effort was renewed in 2014 when the service was ‘re-launched’, but by now the buses have again all but disappeared.
Again in Lahore, in 2015, environmentalist Zar Aslam launched her own rickshaw service exclusively for women, starting with just one pink vehicle with herself behind the wheel. Her reasons, too, were the persecuting male gaze: she noticed how the female employees of her environmental protection non-profit viewed their journeys with trepidation. Thus the Pink Rickshaw scheme, finding new ways to empower women.
While their business models may be imperfect, the value of such initiatives cannot be overemphasised in a culture and environment where women face all sorts of violence and harassment, and where recourse to the law has little meaning. As noted earlier, these schemes are providing not just services to the sisterhood but also employment.
But it is also possible to argue that there is a pernicious underbelly to such rosy conveniences. It can be argued that by reserving vehicles for women, or parking spaces, as a mall in Karachi has done, or compartments in trains, or whatever, notions of gender segregation are being reinforced. Women are further ‘otherised’, excised from public space. And, by implication, if they venture into public spaces and run into trouble, the burden of fault is placed on them. Women are at risk from men and therefore must be separated from them in the interests of their own safety. This is no different from the argument behind veils, or of forcing women to live within the confines of their homes and attain neither an education, nor work.
Women-only services in public transport are boons in the short term. But in the long term, the central problem remains unaddressed: men’s propensity to harass and persecute. Any long-term solution to the vulnerability of women in such spheres has to involve getting the male segments of society to rein in their worst impulses, in strengthening respect for privacy and the rule of law. This is to say nothing of the right to move around freely and safely, and to live life in dignity.
Women everywhere in the world, at all tiers of society, risk being harassed in ways big and small. Where the problem is less endemic, this has been achieved through raising in general a society’s respect for personal freedoms and individual rights, and secondly by enforcing the law. Means of getting complaints to the right quarters, be it the police or complaints commissions (in case of workplaces, for example), must be simplified and widely known.
While for now women can look forward to the prospect of rides reserved for them, the long-term concerns urgently need to be addressed, too.
The writer is a member of staff.
Published in Dawn, March 13th, 2017
