Women pedal their way to freedom

Working-class women typically travel shorter distances and make multiple stops to run errands during a single journey.

Twenty-year-old Rini Burman recently moved from her village in West Bengal to Delhi and is looking for a job to support her family, which currently subsists mostly on her mother’s earnings. Her immediate challenge is getting around without enough money for transport or the bicycle she received in her village.

Marina Bibi Sheikh works as a cook in Gurugram. She uses a cycle to commute between houses in upscale DLF Phase-5, saving on transport costs. (Parveen Kumar/HT Photo)

While studying in a rural government-run school in Nabadwip city in Nadia district, Burman — like all other senior secondary students — received a free bicycle, which she rode to her school, coaching classes, market, bank, and elsewhere in her proximity.

Her mother, Rinki, a domestic worker who has lived in Delhi for years, spends 10-15% of her wage on e-rickshaws, as shared rides are her only option for commuting from their Tughlakabad home to Chittaranjan Park for work. Her youngest daughter spends as much on her school travel. Burman could very well have taken her to school and back, but the family can’t afford to buy a bicycle.

Marina Bibi Sheikh works as a cook in Gurugram. She is thankful that her father taught her to ride a bicycle when the family moved from Nadia in West Bengal to NCR. Now 29, she uses a cycle to commute between houses in upscale DLF Phase-5, saving on transport costs.

Many women like Sheikh, mostly migrants from West Bengal and Bihar, have learned to cycle in their villages due to government-run cycle distribution schemes for adolescent girls. However, older women who missed this opportunity are forced to walk long distances or rely on expensive shared autorickshaws they can barely afford.

In a world of gendered mobility, cycling has been said to do more to emancipate women than “anything else in the world,” American suffragist Susan B Anthony famously said in the 1890s, regarding it as a symbol of “freedom, self-reliance… of free, untrammelled womanhood.”

Today, as cities grapple with air pollution, climate change and health challenges resulting from physical inactivity, cycling is gaining popularity as a way to achieve greener, healthier commutes.

Yet, for many like Sheikh, it’s more of an economic necessity than a lifestyle choice; much like Philomena from Kochi, who took up cycling in her mid-50s to balance her work and care-giving responsibilities.

She makes washing liquid at home and sells it by the bottle. Until about two years ago, she carried supplies on a crowded public bus with erratic service. She readily enrolled when the municipal corporation and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) launched a programme to train women to cycle. After learning to ride, she bought herself a bicycle for ₹7,000.

Now, she no longer has to wait endlessly for the bus. With a bicycle, she has the flexibility to plan her day, make multiple trips, and return home to care for and give medication to her son who has special needs. Brimming with confidence, 56-year-old Philomena now aspires to drive an autorickshaw.

Multiple studies and research show that men and women navigate cities differently. Working-class women typically travel shorter distances and make multiple stops to run errands during a single journey. Those employed in informal work are more likely to take circuitous routes using internal roads.

As a result, women such as Burman seldom use public buses, which operate on arterial routes, even though they can ride for free in Delhi. If the destinations are not walkable, trip-chaining can be expensive, with each e-rickshaw ride costing ₹10.

Balancing multiple responsibilities, such as household work, care-giving and employment, women are often short on time. A bicycle is the most cost-effective solution for them, and yet, few women cyclists are visible on roads.

Rahul Goel, an assistant professor at IIT-Delhi who has authored multiple studies on bicycle use among women, found that cycling in Indian cities is highly “gender-unequal”. According to the last available census, from 2011, 21.7% of working men used bicycles for commuting, compared to only 4.7% of working women. Further, Goel’s analysis shows that women were, on average, one-tenth as likely to cycle as males.

The most obvious reason for this is not having access to bicycles, particularly in low-income households. Even if a bike is available, it is usually reserved for male family members. However, since the launch of a free bicycle scheme for schoolgirls in Bihar in 2006, the dynamics have changed, at least in parts of rural India.

Researchers Karthik Muralidharan and Nishith Prakash found that Bihar’s free bicycle scheme not only improved school enrolment but may have also empowered schoolgirls by challenging patriarchal social norms.

“Families likely would not have purchased bicycles for girls if they were spending their own money, even if they could financially spend the entire cash transfer value on the girl,” they wrote in a 2017 paper titled Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India.

Goel said: “It is this gendering process that the bicycle distribution scheme may have successfully hindered.” For instance, only 1.7% of girls in rural Bihar cycled to school in 2007, but this increased to 13.5% in a decade, he said.

Following the success of the scheme in Bihar, West Bengal, Karnataka, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu launched similar initiatives. The 10 states with the most significant increases in cycling levels among rural girls had the support of bicycle distribution schemes, wrote Goel in a 2024 paper, calling the change a “silent revolution”.

The Tamil Nadu government has expanded the scheme to include all Class 11 students in state-run and aided schools in villages, towns and cities. In the 2024-25 academic year, 548,089 boys and girls, including 31,160 students in Chennai, got bicycles across the state.

State education secretary B Chandra Mohan said the free bicycle was more than just a mode of transport. “For many, it is a means to access education that helps them break free of the shackles of poverty; it’s a ticket to independence, a vehicle of empowerment.”

Scaling up such schemes to urban areas could enhance employment opportunities for women. Greenpeace India’s “Power the Pedal” programme in Bengaluru gave cycles to women factory workers. A study by Goel and team found that 67% of the 151 they interviewed retained the bicycles and used them for commuting.

The lack of bicycle-riding skills also prevents many women from taking up cycling. Goel said interventions addressing this gap can change the population’s mobility patterns. Philomena would vouch for that. She was one of the 700-odd women who learnt to cycle in the “Cycle with Kochi” programme.

Among the diverse group participants, said Manjunath Sekhar, head of sustainable urban mobility at GIZ, were a cancer survivor, a differently abled woman and a transgender person. For many, the training became more than just a skill; it strengthened their livelihoods. A dressmaker, for instance, now collects materials and delivers finished garments directly to clients who can’t make it to her shop, he said.

“What stood out most was the sense of empowerment. No longer reliant on others or spending money on rickshaws, women now enjoy the freedom to move around independently,” said Sekhar.

“Initially, some women encountered hesitation or teasing from male relatives when they showed interest in cycling. However, after completing the training, many purchased bicycles and are now confidently making them part of their daily lives,” he said.

Firoza Dadan, Mumbai’s first “bicycle mayor”, appointed by Dutch NGO BYCS that promotes cycling in urban areas worldwide, launched the “MeCycleRider” initiative in 2019. Starting from the Nehru Nagar slum with a domestic help named Asha, she has since covered 250 women, distributed 50 bicycles in two phases, and provided training in road safety for navigating busy streets.

With much of the road space hogged by motor vehicles, cyclists, like pedestrians, are most vulnerable on city roads. This scares away many women from taking up cycling. “The impact of the lack of safety on people is also gendered. It is not just a societal imposition; women have also internalised it,” said Goel.

To this day, Yuvraj Halder from Bengali Colony in Tughlakabad and Aminul Haq from Sarawasti Kunj in Gurugram regret encouraging their wives to ride bicycles on city roads.

When the family moved from the Burdwan district to Delhi, Halder’s wife, Lipi, already knew how to cycle. A domestic help, she bought a cycle just before the Covid-19 pandemic to go to work and fetch her son from school. In March 2023, on the way to pick up her child from school, she was run over by a truck. “This was right inside CR Park, a residential colony. Badly crushed, she died right in front of me,” Haldar recalled.

Aminul Haq had moved from Dhubri in Assam to Gurugram where he lost his wife in March 2024. Like any other day, 26-year-old Naseema Khatoon, who came from Cooch Behar in West Bengal, was bicycling to La Lagune Apartments, where she worked as a domestic helper. While crossing the Golf Course Road, she was struck by a speeding SUV and died two days later.

Internal roads should have lower speed limits by default to ensure cyclists’ safety. However, Lipi’s death shows that this is not always the case. Arterial roads, which are increasingly designed to be signal-free with no crossovers, pose even greater dangers for cyclists and pedestrians alike. Khatoon’s situation serves as another example of this issue.

Shreya Gadepalli, founder of Urbanworks, a Chennai-based non-profit promoting active mobility, stressed the importance of dedicated cycle tracks, fixing traffic junctions, and providing safe crossing opportunities every 200 metres. “Engineering and design should precede social changes. More women will cycle when roads are designed for cyclists. When more women are cycling, there is safety in numbers. There’s less harassment because it becomes far more normal in everyone’s eyes to see women cycling,” she said. Dadan hopes that once cyclists gain a critical mass, “group dynamism” will pressure authorities to provide for cycling infrastructure, including parking stands at public places and transit stations to prevent theft.

While bicycles are the cheapest mode of transport, buying one can still be difficult for economically weaker families, especially for the woman of the house. In 2020, Niti Aayog recommended making cycles cheaper through tax reduction and establishing a bicycle development council that could work on all aspects of promoting cycling in India.

Experts suggest micro-financing options or small loans. A World Bank report cited a successful initiative in Pudukkottai, Tamil Nadu, launched in 1991 to promote literacy by training women activists to ride bicycles, and eventually, many more joined in. It showed that providing easy loans helped women learn to cycle, aiding their daily chores, and achieving 100% literacy in the district.

Rini Burman, for one, does not require research or policy recommendations to know that a bicycle would greatly improve her situation, just as it has helped her older cousin, Swantana.

Swantana couldn’t continue her studies beyond the tenth grade in order to qualify for the free bicycle programme. But she learned to ride the bike that her sister-in-law left behind. Now a homemaker, she manages her son’s school runs, grocery shopping, and social visits—all on the pre-loved bike. Given a chance, that’s how far a bicycle can go.