Taxshe, an exclusive all-women driver-on-demand cab service running in Bengaluru and the National Capital Region (NCR), which won the global ‘Sustainable Development Goals and Her’ award in 2019, is on expansion mode and plans to provide jobs to 5,000 women from weaker sections of society in the next five years.
The World Bank’s India magazine has featured Taxshe under the heading ‘Driving Change in Bengaluru’. It describes the story of Taxshe as “not just about women’s safety; it’s a story about empowerment and entrepreneurship, and bringing women from the most underprivileged sections of society into the workforce”.
Vandana Suri, founder of the city-based Taxshe, told The Hindu that women from slums, and weaker sections having primary education were being recruited for starting an exclusive all-women cab service in other cities. Ms. Suri started with driving the taxis herself in order to set an example before recruiting women. “A taxi service that employs underprivileged women in a mostly male-dominated profession is slowly driving change,” the World Bank magazine said.
Taxshe started operations in 2015 by providing transportation services to schoolchildren and coaching centres, and for many women to offices and airports in Bengaluru and Delhi. “I was an alternate mom taking children to school. And that is when our acceptability became high. We weren’t competing with men at all,” she said. Currently, there are 65 women drivers, including 10 having their own taxies. “Many of the drivers are single mothers,” she said.
Ms. Suri was one of the two global winners of the ‘SDGs and Her’ competition for women micro-entrepreneurs conducted by the World Bank Group in partnership with the UN Development Program, UN Women, and Wharton School’s Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research.
The women drivers are trained in self-defence and taught about their legal rights. They work 5-6 hours a day and earn up to ₹20,000 month, Ms. Suri said.
Flexible timings and a model of partial ownership of the taxis by the drivers themselves further helped in recruiting and retaining the women as drivers. Taxshe has an in-house team of trainers, and the training can go on for a few months, Ms. Suri said.
