Ten special city buses equipped with CCTV cameras and women conductors trained in the martial arts, rolled out here on Wednesday morning. These buses — six private and four from the fleet of Assam State Transport Corporation — are exclusively for women and children below eight. District Transport Officer, Kamrup, Gautam Das said the special buses had been introduced to make women’s journeys safe and comfortable. “All the ten women bus conductors have been given training in martial arts, both for their self-defence and to handle emergency situations,” he told The Hindu . “They have also been trained to quickly connect to the 108 emergency response centres during medical and accident emergency. It is a pilot project. Depending on the response, we plan to train more women bus conductors and introduce more such buses exclusively for women passengers.”
Mr. Das said that while the ten buses would now be driven by male drivers, the District Transport Authorities would impart training to women willing to take up the profession. “The response to the announcement of our plan to train women bus conductors was overwhelming,” Mr. Das said. “Within ten days of the announcement, these ten women, two of them graduates, came forward to undergo training.”
The District Transport authorities roped in Dipali Rajkhowa, the first woman in Assam to drive a self-owned city bus in 1989, to interact with the women bus conductors and raise their confidence. They also interacted with 12 women drivers trained by Meghali Bora, who runs a driving centre for women in the city, for a taxi service exclusively for women that the district authorities are planning to launch soon.
