Speaker
Description
Introduction and research problem:
India’s transition towards electric mobility is frequently presented as a technological, environmental and infrastructural transformation. Yet transitions in urban transport also raise questions about who participates in emerging mobility systems, who benefits from them, and under what conditions. This is particularly significant for women, whose mobility and access to transport-related livelihoods are shaped by gendered divisions of labour, household responsibilities, safety concerns and unequal access to resources (Hanson, 2010; Law, 1999; Lucas, 2012; Sheller, 2018).
Women remain substantially underrepresented in transport work in India. At the same time, electric three-wheelers (e3Ws) are increasingly being promoted as both a low-carbon mobility option and a potential livelihood opportunity. Governments, civil society organisations and private actors have consequently introduced programmes to train women to drive auto-rickshaws and e-rickshaws, facilitate access to vehicles and finance, and create pathways into mobility-related employment and entrepreneurship.
However, becoming a driver involves more than acquiring a technical skill. Women's participation in transport work is shaped by access to productive assets, credit, licensing systems, infrastructure and safe working environments, but also by the organisation of everyday life. Gendered divisions of unpaid work mean that women's paid work is frequently negotiated alongside domestic and care responsibilities (Hanson, 2010; Kwan, 1999). Research on women's mobility in India similarly demonstrates that travel is embedded within household responsibilities, social norms, safety concerns and unequal access to transport resources (Mahadevia & Advani, 2016; Pani et al., 2023; Zehba M. P., Rajendran, & Firoz, 2025; Zehba M. P et al., 2026) .
These concerns are particularly relevant to the emerging electric three-wheeler transition. A recent review of gender-inclusive e3W initiatives in India identified interventions across 12 cities in nine states and found that existing measures have largely focused on subsidies, credit and training, while monitoring of women's actual entry and retention remains limited (Varghese et al., 2025) . Its Amritsar case demonstrates that vehicle ownership, flexible working hours, safety, care responsibilities and social acceptance can shape women's ability to enter and remain in the sector.
This paper therefore asks: How do publicly documented women-focused three-wheeler initiatives in India address the social, financial, institutional and everyday conditions that shape women's participation in the emerging electric mobility transition?
Rather than evaluating individual programmes or identifying a single transferable model, the paper comparatively examines how different interventions conceptualise and respond to the conditions of women's participation.
Conceptual and theoretical framework:
The paper brings together feminist mobility research, mobility justice, capability thinking and just-transition perspectives. Feminist mobility scholarship has demonstrated that mobility is not simply an individual act of movement but is produced through social relations, gender roles, spatial structures and access to resources (Law, 1999; Hanson, 2010). Mobility justice extends this concern by foregrounding the unequal distribution of mobility opportunities and the political, social and environmental relations through which mobility is organised (Sheller, 2018). In the context of decarbonisation, just-transition scholarship similarly stresses that technological transitions are shaped by institutional, economic and social conditions rather than technology alone (Heffron & McCauley, 2018; Newell & Mulvaney, 2013)
The paper builds analytically on the author's doctoral research on low-income working women's everyday mobility in Kochi, India. That research demonstrated how women's mobility is embedded within care responsibilities, unpaid labour, household expectations, time constraints and transport-related barriers (Zehba M. P et al., 2026; Zehba M. P., Rajendran, & Firoz C., 2025) . Recent national evidence further demonstrates the significance of unpaid caregiving and care-related travel to gendered time poverty in India, reinforcing the need to consider care and temporal inequalities within transport research.
The paper extends this perspective from women as mobility users to women as mobility workers. Modern time-geographical concepts are employed as an analytical sensitising framework rather than as a direct replication of the doctoral study. The analysis considers how women's opportunities to participate in transport work are conditioned by constraints on time, space, resources and institutional arrangements.
The paper proposes a distinction between access, capability and sustained participation. Access refers to the resources and opportunities provided by programmes, including training, licensing, finance, vehicle ownership or leasing and infrastructure. Capability concerns women's ability to convert these opportunities into actual participation within the conditions of their everyday lives. Sustained participation refers to whether women can remain in the occupation and derive meaningful livelihood opportunities from it. This distinction draws attention to the difference between being offered a mobility opportunity and being capable of using that opportunity in practice.
Methods:
The study uses a comparative documentary analysis of publicly available information on women-focused three-wheeler and e-mobility initiatives in India.
The initial sampling frame is informed by the inventory of gender-inclusive e3W initiatives identified by Varghese et al. (2025) , which documents interventions across 12 cities and nine states. Additional initiatives are included where sufficient publicly accessible documentation is available from government agencies, development organisations, programme implementers and other credible institutional sources.
The study does not claim to provide an exhaustive inventory of every women-focused auto or e-rickshaw programme in India. Instead, it develops a purposive comparative dataset of initiatives for which sufficient information is publicly documented.
Programme documents are coded across five broad dimensions: (1) entry and skills, including driving training and licensing; (2) economic access, including subsidies, credit and vehicle ownership; (3) institutional and collective support, including self-help groups and partnerships; (4) working conditions and everyday life, including flexibility, safety, infrastructure and care-related considerations; and (5) post-entry support and reported outcomes, including market access, employment, ownership and retention.
The analysis focuses not only on what programmes provide, but also on which dimensions of women's participation remain unaddressed or poorly documented. This approach treats programme documentation as evidence of intervention design and institutional priorities rather than as direct evidence of programme effectiveness.
Results and emerging findings:
The preliminary analysis indicates considerable variation in how programmes approach women's entry into the three-wheeler sector. Some interventions primarily operate as skills and licensing programmes, while others combine training with access to vehicles, finance or employment. A further group of initiatives has developed women-led enterprise models in which women participate as owners or co-owners of e-rickshaws and are connected to specific markets. Other initiatives combine training, financing, vehicle access and collective or institutional support.
This variation suggests that intervention logics are moving beyond a narrow training-to-employment model. Programmes such as the Pink City Rickshaw Company in Jaipur and Lake City Rickshaws in Udaipur connect driving skills with enterprise development, ownership and market linkages. SEWA's work in Delhi combines driving skills and licensing support with financing for e-rickshaw ownership. Other initiatives combine training with vehicle provision, subsidies, institutional partnerships or post-training support.
At the same time, the documentary evidence reveals a persistent gap between programme inputs and the everyday conditions of sustained participation. Publicly reported indicators commonly include numbers of women trained, licensed or provided with vehicles. Much less information is available on how women negotiate working hours with care responsibilities, whether they remain in the occupation over time, how ownership affects household decision-making, or how infrastructure and safety shape their daily working practices.
The Amritsar evidence is particularly illustrative. CEEW's research found financial, institutional and socio-cultural barriers to women's participation, while participants highlighted the importance of vehicle ownership, flexible working hours and infrastructure. The study also found that rental arrangements could leave women with limited earnings, demonstrating how access to a vehicle does not automatically translate into a viable livelihood.
These findings do not demonstrate that programmes offering broader packages of support necessarily produce better outcomes. Rather, they reveal different understandings of what constitutes an enabling environment for women's participation. They also expose a significant evidence gap: programme monitoring frequently captures inputs and immediate outputs but provides limited evidence about longer-term participation, everyday working conditions and the interaction between paid mobility work and unpaid care.
Discussion and conclusion:
The paper argues that gender inclusion in an urban mobility transition should not be understood simply as increasing the number of women who are trained to drive electric vehicles. A transition can be formally open to women while remaining practically difficult to access when women lack control over productive assets, face restrictive licensing or financing arrangements, encounter unsafe infrastructure, or must reconcile paid transport work with unpaid care responsibilities.
The contribution of the paper is therefore to shift the analytical question from “How many women have entered the electric mobility sector?” towards “Under what everyday conditions can women convert access to mobility livelihoods into sustained participation?”
Connecting programme design with feminist mobility research, time-geographical thinking and mobility-justice perspectives makes visible a dimension of just transition that can be overlooked in technology-oriented transport policy: the relationship between technological change and the temporal, spatial and social organisation of everyday life.
The paper concludes that a gender-inclusive electric mobility transition requires attention not only to access to vehicles and skills, but also to the institutional, economic and everyday conditions through which women are able to use those opportunities. It further identifies the limited availability of longitudinal and gender-disaggregated evidence on retention, working conditions, care impacts and everyday outcomes as an important research and policy gap.
In doing so, the paper positions women's participation in emerging electric mobility not simply as an issue of workforce diversification, but as a question of who is enabled to participate in and benefit from urban mobility transitions, through what institutional arrangements, and under what conditions of everyday life.
References
Hanson, S. (2010). Gender and mobility: new approaches for informing sustainability. Gender, Place & Culture, 17(1), 5–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/09663690903498225
Heffron, R. J., & McCauley, D. (2018). What is the ‘Just Transition’? Geoforum, 88, 74–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.GEOFORUM.2017.11.016
Kwan, M. P. (1999). Kwan-Gender and Individual Access to Urban Opportunities- A Study Using Space–Time Measures. Professional Geographer, 51(2), 210–227.
Law, R. (1999). Beyond “women and transport”: Towards new geographies of gender and daily mobility. Progress in Human Geography, 23(4), 567–588. https://doi.org/10.1191/030913299666161864;WGROUP:STRING:PUBLICATION
Lucas, K. (2012). Transport and social exclusion: Where are we now? Transport Policy, 20, 105–113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2012.01.013
Mahadevia, D., & Advani, D. (2016). Gender differentials in travel pattern - The case of a mid-sized city, Rajkot, India. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 44, 292–302. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2016.01.002
Newell, P., & Mulvaney, D. (2013). The political economy of the “just transition.” Geographical Journal, 179(2), 132–140. https://doi.org/10.1111/GEOJ.12008
Pani, A., Sahu, P., & Mishra, S. (2023). Gender disparities in multimodal travel Attitudes, Behavior, and satisfaction. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 123, 103917. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.TRD.2023.103917
Sheller, Mimi. (2018). Mobility justice : the politics of movement in an age of extremes. Verso. https://books.google.com/books/about/Mobility_Justice.html?id=gJJLDwAAQBAJ
Varghese, C. T., Raghavan, S., & Vidhani, V. (2025). How can India Make the Electric Three-wheeler Transition Gender-inclusive? A Case Study of Amritsar. www.creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc/4.0/legalcode.
Zehba M. P., F., Rajendran, L. P., & Firoz, C. M. (2025). “Where Is the Time?”: Time Poverty and Women’s Urban Mobility Narratives in Kochi, India. Urban Planning, 10(0), 9272. https://doi.org/10.17645/UP.9272
Zehba M. P., F., Rajendran, L. P., & Firoz C., M. (2025). “Where Is the Time?”: Time Poverty and Women’s Urban Mobility Narratives in Kochi, India. Urban Planning, 10(0), 9272. https://doi.org/10.17645/UP.9272
Zehba M. P, F., Rajendran, L. P., & Firoz C, M. (2026). Gender and mobility: household dynamics, caregiving and patriarchal constraints shaping women’s movement in Kochi, India. Third World Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2026.2697968