India’s female labour force participation rate remains low despite recent modest gains. One critical but underappreciated constraint for women to participate in the workforce is access to affordable, safe, and reliable transport. Women from low-income and working-class households disproportionately rely on public transport to access work. Inadequate transport infrastructure therefore shrinks their employment geographies, worsens time poverty, and exposes them to risks to their safety. In this context, state-led fare-free transport schemes, such as the Shakti scheme in Karnataka, offer a crucial opportunity to expand women’s mobility and their economic participation. In this seminar, we discuss the impact of such schemes on women’s paid employment, access to the labour market, changes in income, mobility behaviour, as well as feelings of dignity and autonomy, with special focus on the Shakti scheme in Karnataka.
With Discussant:
Sonal Shah (Executive Director of the Centre of Sustainable and Equitable Cities; Founder of The Urban Catalysts)
Dr. Madhusree Jana holds a PhD in Social Geography from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her research focuses on how displacement reshapes gender relations and impacts women’s reproductive rights; spanning the areas of women’s informal work, reproductive labour, sexual and reproductive health rights, and forced displacement. With extensive fieldwork experience, she has worked with surrogates, egg donors, and displaced women across India. Her empirical work has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals and book chapters. In the Laws of Social Reproduction, she researches surrogacy and egg donation in India’s Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) sector as well as gender and mobility.
