Within minutes of taking oath as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu (TN), MK Stalin announced free travel for all women including working professionals and students in state-owned ordinary fare buses, thus fulfilling a poll promise.

It is no secret that Indian politics, especially TN politics, employs promises to not only garner mass support but also effect the change a State needs. TN’s politics has afforded its people subsidised rice, maternity assistance, gas stoves and washing machines, cycles and laptops to students and cash aid for women family heads, among others. In these instances where political promises come to fruition, we witness a socio-economic turning point.

For the free bus service, rolled out on May 8, the State government will pay transport corporations ₹1,200 crore — an estimated 40 per cent of their revenue — a year. While political pundits wax eloquent on the trade-off between social justice and economic growth, for TN’s women and the State overall, this scheme is a welcome move.

TN has 5,600 intra-city ordinary fare buses — affordable and halting at all stops along their designated routes. Additionally, there are express, deluxe, and air-conditioned buses taking the tally up to 9,000. These serve TN’s 7.2 crore population, of which women constitute almost 50 per cent. Though public transit’s reliability needs to be improved by a) making it demand-responsive, b) increasing the number of buses and routes, and c) enhancing first- and last-mile connectivity, free bus travel is a giant leap forward to achieve gender parity.

Women’s constraints

Women’s participation in paid activities is constrained by socio-economic and cultural issues as well as asymmetries in labour market opportunity structure. A critical factor is mobility, i.e. access to affordable, reliable and safe transport modes to places of education and work. For girls studying and women working — across TN — as municipality employees, domestic help, foundry workers, flower vendors, healthcare professionals, platform workers, teachers or cops, the bus is their lifeline.

A gender-disaggregated analysis of Census 2011 data is significant. Among those who travel to work, more women rely on public transit than men. While men’s top four modes of commute include bus (29 per cent), moped/scooter (26 per cent), bicycle (18 per cent), and walking (18 per cent), women’s top modes include walking (45 per cent), bus (35 per cent), moped/ scooter (8 per cent), and bicycle (4 per cent). Given that four out of five women across rural and urban TN walk or use the public transit to work, the policy measure to make bus travel free for them is a game-changer.

In a month constituting 25 working days and at a maximum bus fare of ₹23 per ride (as set by the state in 2018), the policy of free bus travel helps women save up to ₹1,150 per month. At an average monthly wage of ₹4,000-11,000 — derived from ILO’s India Wage Report and data from the National Sample Survey Office — TN’s new policy will yield 10-30 per cent savings for women. With both wages and livelihoods severely affected due to the ongoing pandemic — more so for women than men, and notwithstanding the gender wage gap across industries, free travel in public transit is the much-needed impetus to women’s socio-economic mobility.

Global experience

Research from around the world has well-established the positive effect of access to mobility — paved roads and public transit, for instance — on female labour force participation (FLFP). Thanks to decades of affirmative action — from labour welfare policies to handouts such as household appliances that ease the burden of domestic responsibilities on women, TN boasts of an FLFP rate of 30 per cent, nearly 10 percentage points higher than the national average, as per the Periodic Labour Force Surveys. To increase the FLFP rate to at least 50 per cent — a figure last seen in the 1980s — TN must continue easing women’s access to mobility.

Not just TN. States like Delhi and Punjab too have operationalised fare-free public transit (FFPT) for women. While the impact of these schemes launched in 2019-20 is yet to be studied, FFPT has found over 100 instances of application globally.

From the subsidy-conscious Australia of the 1980s and the Netherlands in the 1990s to private-vehicle-heavy markets like the US in the 2000s, or China, the UK, Belgium, Estonia, New Zealand and Nigeria, among others implementing FFPT the last few years, free travel for the elderly, women, students or marginalised communities has been beneficial — with public transit ridership increasing and the marginalised finding affordable means to participate in the economy.

Enhancing safety

Indeed, free travel incentivises more women to use public transit, increasing their presence in public spaces. This in turn enhances safety and brings more women outside their homes. All of India, ergo, must urgently introduce concessionary travel for students, women, transgenders, persons with disabilities and the elderly. The policy of free travel has spillover effects on the economy and is an inflection point in India’s post-Covid recovery, resilience and growth.

The writer is Head of Research at Ola Mobility Institute

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