Women with Wheels: Training Marginalised Women as Professional Drivers (Azad Foundation)

Azad Foundation was founded in New Delhi in 2008, working with its social-enterprise arm Sakha Consulting Wings (Sakha Cabs), to train resource-poor women — many survivors of domestic or gender-based violence — as professional commercial drivers, and more recently as delivery and two-wheeler riders and public bus drivers.

Since 2014 Azad has also engaged the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC), the public bus operator, to remove entry barriers — minimum height, prior experience and training-fee requirements — that had long excluded women from driving public buses.

Since 2008, more than 6,000 women have obtained driving licences and over 4,500 have been placed into paid driving or riding roles, cumulatively generating over $4.1 million in income and delivering more than 5 million safe rides; in 2024–25 alone, 532 women obtained licences and 278 joined the transport workforce, including 30 who joined Rapido as two-wheeler captains. In 2022 DTC relaxed its entry criteria, enabling 93 women, 46 of them trained by Azad, to become the first cohort of women driving Delhi's public buses.

The programme's outcomes are documented mainly through Azad's own annual reporting, corroborated by independent coverage and a 2018 McGill GrOW working paper that critically examined cost-effectiveness and scaling challenges. A 2015 Quartz investigation found the wider women-driver sector in India still counted only 200–250 professional drivers at the time, indicating this labour-market shift has moved slowly and that licensing costs, safety concerns and customer bias remain real barriers.