A video went viral on private messaging groups and on social media last week. The scene was familiar to anyone who has travelled by Mumbai’s suburban trains, called ‘locals’ in the city’s tongue. Two women were fighting with all their might, yelling the choicest of abuses and tearing each other’s hair out in ways that would embarrass little children. Their fight had ostensibly begun over a seat and quickly escalated into personal insults, as all such altercations on ‘locals’ do. People from outside the city found in it another reason to run down Mumbai, and scoffed at how people behave in the city that’s falling apart and so on.
No one should have to fight this way for a seat during their commute, no one should have to fight at all for a seat in the ‘local’ or for standing room in a bus or for space on the road to squeeze a two-wheeler through. This is not about the people of Mumbai, this is about the transport infrastructure of the city that brings out the worst in people and pushes them to behave in ways that can hardly be called civilised. This is also not merely about the lack of adequate infrastructure, which is certainly an issue to obsess over, but equally about its disparity and inequality across the city.
In terms of infrastructure, there are islands of well-planned and comfortable amenities amidst a vast sea of haphazard and life-threatening infrastructure. Think arterial roads such as Marine Drive or the main street in Bandra Kurla Complex against other arterial roads such as Swami Vivekanand Road (SV Road) on the western side or Lal Bahadur Shastri Marg (LBS Marg) in the eastern corridor – the quality is different, hurdles are many more, and the number of potholes or uneven and badly-laid surfaces are enough to put people off road travel. The less said about the inner streets, the better. Show me a pavement in Mumbai and it’s possible to discern which area of the city it is from. There are a vast number of roads in the suburbs where the municipal corporation does not even pretend to mark out and construct pavements. The duality in public services and infrastructure is unmissable.
This duality is now reflecting even in the ‘locals’ – the air-conditioned trains introduced with great fanfare on both the Western and Central Railway corridors are hardly the gleaming boon they were made out to be. They were a welcome, an overdue, addition to the commuting options that Mumbaikars have but their introduction has led to several issues that could have been foreseen. Except in super-peak and dense crush-load hours, the air-conditioned ‘locals’ run near-empty; hardly a handful of commuters are seen seated in a compartment. This, expectedly, increases the commuter load on the train that draws into the platform immediately after; it is a nightmare to board it or alight from it with life and limb unharmed. Not everyone on the platform is able to make it in, which often leads to a super dense load in the next ‘local’ or two. It's surprising that more fights, of the sort that went viral, do not happen more often.
The Western Railway adding 25 extra seats for women – which means standing room for approximately 100 more calculated by the railway authorities at five standees per seat – in each 12-car rake, increasing the total capacity for women commuters is welcome. With this modification, the total seating capacity in a 12-car rake increased to about 25% from the earlier 23%, according to reports. This matches the tickets and season pass’ distribution: roughly 25-26% ticket or pass holders tend to be women, according to the railways. One of the reasons for this increase, the authorities explained, was the addition of air-conditioned ‘locals’ on the railway corridor with a corresponding decrease in the number of non-air-conditioned ones. The fistfights and colourful abuses will, hopefully, reduce.
However, there are multiple larger issues that demand attention too, involving not only railways but the plethora of agencies and authorities that operate and manage the city’s transport network: Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, BEST Undertaking, Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation, Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation, among others. Irrespective of the planning and implementing authority, the most over-arching issue of all is that Mumbai’s public infrastructure, especially transport systems, can hardly be called gender-friendly or gender-supportive.
Women commuters have been given small concessions such as separate compartments in ‘locals’ and metro, or front entry and special seats marked in BEST buses. But railway station access is not always gender-friendly, bus stops are hardly so. In areas that boast of better infrastructure such as good roads with broad pavements, appropriate level of lighting is an issue and access to intermediate transport options such as taxis or rickshaws can test the nerves of the best.
The most exasperating, even life-threatening, part of the transport jigsaw is the humble pavement which supports and encourages walking – the most preferred as well as the most widely used commute option by women. Studies have shown that well over half of the women who leave their homes for work or care trips, such as dropping children to school or shopping for home essentials, walk to their destination and back. They are forced to negotiate moving and parked vehicles on roads, because pavements were never made or are occupied by a horde of people for a variety of activities other than walking.
Mobility is a major limiting issue in cities for women. Not having adequate and reliable public transport, safe streets, free-to-walk pavements and so on have been shown to severely limit women’s mobility which in turn influences their decisions – and their families’ mindset – to work or study or access other empowering opportunities far away from their homes. Fewer women than men own and use private transport, studies have repeatedly shown, whether in large metropolitan cities like Mumbai or smaller ones like Jalandhar. The more robust and safer a city’s system of public transport, the higher the number of women who are motivated to step out of their homes.
Sustainable urban development will remain elusive without integrating women’s – and girls’ – safety comfort, convenience and affordability in urban transport, a paper by Safetipin and Institute for Transportation & Development Policy pointed out. While there is momentum at different level of governments to address women’s safety in public transport, “transport investments are largely gender blind with a limited understanding of the inter-relationships between gender and transport inequities,” it added.
The first step towards making Mumbai’s public and intermediate transport gender-sensitive or gender-supportive would be to do a comprehensive gender audit of all transport systems, including pavements, and identify where they fail Mumbai’s women. When this audit is in, corrective action can begin.
Smruti Koppikar, journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and media. She is the founder editor of ‘Question of Cities’
