Authors

• Nidhi Prabha, Research Scholar, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Public transport systems are primarily understood as a matter of infrastructure. This paper contests this understanding and contends that public transport also constitutes ‘public-space’, which illustrates differential usership and in that sense becomes a differentiated space. It argues that when daily mobility of citizens is examined in the public buses and metros of Delhi, it indicates social-structural- embeddedness onto the transit systems, which is shaped by the deep-distributions of different categories of commuters. In other words, the diverse experiences of daily mobility, when gendered, indicate how infrastructure becomes an enlivened structure enabling and disabling mobilities and citizenship for different genders differently.

In the case of Delhi’s public transit systems, gendering the multiple experiences of everyday mobility through narratives of women commuters in the Metros and the public-buses, this paper challenges the notion of a ‘neutral commuter’ that largely overshadows transit planning and forecast studies. In the metros the delimited space of the ‘women-only’ coach renders certain symbolic boundary- keeping apart from the physical one. In the public buses transit-planning, class and gender intersect with each other in a manner that deems a serious degree of ‘time-poverty’ on some categories of women commuters.