Women with Wheels
Tuesday, 15 October 2024One of the pleasures of my travels these days is often encountering projects our foundation – Planet Wheeler – or in my Lonely Planet days the Lonely Planet Foundation – has been involved with. In April in Nairobi, Kenya I visited the amazing Food4Education project run by Wawira Nijru.
▲ And left wearing one of her Tap2Eat watches. The Lonely Planet Foundation played a tiny part in Wawira’s terrific story.
Visiting India in September-October I met another amazing woman, Meenu Vadera who came up with Women With Wheels. I was at the GX tourism conference in Jaipur, organized by G Adventures, and transport was provided by Women With Wheels and Meenu was one of the star speakers at the conference. Why were there no women taxi drivers in India she thought? Well in 15 years she’s trained 5000 female drivers and quite frankly, given some of the horrible experiences I had during this trip with a man behind the wheel I’d take a women driver any day of the week!
◄ One of the problems has been overcoming family opposition and going out to Jaipur Airport at the end of the conference our driver said when she decided to become a driver her brother was the main opposition, her father on the other hand approved and supported her. Three years later? ‘My brother has come around.’
The roads of India have always been fraught places, I realized that on my very first visit, travelling across India on the ‘Hippy Trail’ back in 1972. The driving may not have improved over the years, but the traffic has got far worse.
The statistics don’t lie, in sheer number of accidents, accidents per 100,000km covered or by any other statistic this is one of the least safe countries in the world on the roads. I can’t fully understand why it is so bad, in lots of places in the West your Uber driver may well have come from the sub-continent at some time and they may not all be paragons of safety, but in general they’re no better or worse than other drivers around them. Back in India, however, the driving is lethal. Lane discipline? Never heard of it. A safe distance to the car in front? Forget it. A blind corner coming up? Let’s overtake.
Of course not all drivers on the road in India are terrible, but far too many of them are shockers. Mr Azad Singh, you’re excused. You drove me the 60km (40 miles) from Mussoorie to Rishikesh and you were absolutely fine: sane, safe, sensible and probably no slower than other drives I rode with. The 50km from Dehra Dun Airport to Mussoorie? A scare every corner of the route. The 30km from Rishikesh to Haridwar? Terrifying. Even the final five km from Nizamuddin Railway Station in New Delhi to Connaught Place? I was so happy to get out of the taxi and shut the door behind me.
▲ Apart from frightening drivers it can also be amazing the vehicles you see on Indian roads these days. On my first morning in New Delhi I counted 39 Lamborghinis parked at the Imperial Hotel. A week later, when I returned to New Delhi I asked the resplendent doorman – a towering Sikh, brightly coloured turban, a wide twirling moustache – where they were gone. ‘They all drove away,’ he told me, ‘going BWARNG, BWARNG.’
▲ A Tata Nano in Ratnagiri in 2016
On the other hand I saw no Tata Nanos – well perhaps one glimpsed from a highway. The Nano was intended to be ‘a people’s car,’ an Indian volkswagen. They never cost the intended ‘one lakh rupees’ – about US$1000 at the time – and they were never successful. Indian drivers after a first new car preferred a Maruti, the Indian-manufactured Suzukis. Putting a Nano through a European crash test, which indicated they were a death trap, didn’t help. Nano production simply petered out.
