A Broken Panic Button Encapsulates the Lives of Delhi’s Women App-Taxi Drivers

Around 2:45 in the morning, Meena*, a cab driver in south Delhi, pulled up on the side of a dimly lit road near AIIMS to pick up a booking. The man who got in smelled of alcohol. Within minutes, his tone turned intrusive. When she asked him to behave, he leaned forward and tried to touch her. She reached for the panic button installed under her dashboard.

Nothing. Not even a signal. She pressed it again. Still nothing.

“I finally stopped at a petrol pump and asked the staff for help,” she said, sitting cross-legged in her one-room flat in west Delhi. “The button is a sticker. That’s all it is. A red sticker for show.”

Meena never received a follow-up call from the company. No inquiry, no support, and certainly no accountability. Stories like hers aren’t unusual. They are the norm for women navigating India’s ride-hailing economy – underpaid, unprotected and unseen.

Women behind the wheel, but not in the picture

Official numbers on how many women drive for Ola, Uber or any other aggregator don’t exist; the companies don’t share that data. The state doesn’t demand it. Invisibility begins there.

But even without numbers, the imbalance is clear. Walk through any cab stand or aggregator meet-up point in a metro city and you’ll see an industry of men, with a handful of women scattered across shifts, often at night, when they can rent a car more cheaply.

Women like Asha Kumari, 41, from Gurugram, who left a job at a tailoring unit to drive, talk about their lives in blunt terms. “There are no washrooms we can use, there’s nowhere to eat. If you call the helpline, they just say, ‘Sorry.’ That’s it.”

Asha belongs to a Dalit community. She says she’s been spat at, questioned about her caste by customers and told to “drive faster like a man”. The harassment is layered: it isn’t just about gender, it’s about where you come from, what surname you have, and whether the person in your backseat thinks you belong in the front.

A broken button for a broken system

In 2018, after a series of public assaults involving cabs, India’s Ministry of Road Transport ordered all commercial taxis to be equipped with GPS trackers and panic buttons. On paper, every aggregator complied.

But in reality, the buttons don’t work. The Delhi government’s Anti‑Corruption Branch found in 2023 that none of the panic‑button alerts sent from buses, taxis, and auto‑rickshaws had ever reached the 112 emergency control room, and drivers confirmed that panic‑button alarms never received responses. Every woman I spoke to had tried to use the button at some point. Most gave up after the first or second time.

Meena called her company’s helpline after her scare near AIIMS. She was put on hold. No callback. No FIR filed. “They treat us like numbers. If something happens, it’s your bad luck.”

There is no official grievance redressal system for drivers. They are not employees, they’re “partners”. Which means they get no HR, no legal team, no human being to call. The only feedback they receive is through an app, usually in the form of a one-star rating that can cut their incentives or, worse, get them suspended.

Masculinity on the road

In cinema, the cabbie is always a man. He’s gritty, often broke, sometimes philosophical. From Rajinikanth’s Baasha to Nana Patekar in Taxi No. 9211, he’s heroic because he conquers the city.

When women are shown in cars, it’s usually in the backseat. When they’re behind the wheel, they’re either rich, quirky or temporary. Never a worker. Never the one holding the steering wheel for 12 hours straight, navigating strangers, traffic and threats.

In Tamil cinema, anti-caste voices like Pa. Ranjith have reimagined space and resistance – Kaala turns Dharavi’s roads into sites of assertion. But women drivers remain invisible, even in radical scripts.

Reports from the government’s own think tanks like NITI Aayog mention the gig economy in glowing terms. But they rarely break down the data by gender, caste or community. The absence is not accidental; it allows policy to remain blind to what it doesn’t want to fix.

Feminist economist Leela Fernandes called it “policy erasure”, the quiet way bureaucracies erase the lives of people they don’t want to accommodate. “If you don’t count them, you don’t have to protect them.”

Dalit women drivers are doubly erased from data, from law and from the narratives of progress that tech companies love to tell. The road is sold to them as a path to freedom. But it’s often a trap that makes them visible enough to be targeted and invisible enough to be abandoned.

Harassment disguised as ‘customer feedback’

Ask any woman driver and she’ll tell you what happens when she speaks up. Customers retaliate by giving a low rating. The app takes that rating as gospel. Too many “complaints” and you're off the platform.

Savita, 28, a single mother from Faridabad, described what happened when a passenger slid his hand forward and brushed against her thigh. “I yelled and asked him to get out. Next day, my incentives dropped. I checked the app; he’d given me one star and said I was rude.”

When she reported the incident, the company replied with a templated message: “Thanks for your feedback. We’re investigating.” That was the end of it.

There’s no redressal mechanism for sexual harassment. The POSH Act doesn’t apply to platform workers because they’re not recognised as employees. There’s no Internal Complaints Committee or anti-harassment policy. In legal terms, these women exist in a void.

When Meena began driving in 2020, she felt proud. She posted a photo in uniform, holding her car keys, on Facebook. Her relatives praised her. Neighbours whispered.

But three years in, the excitement has worn off. “Every day I think: will this be the day someone breaks the window or pulls a knife?” she said. “I carry pepper spray. I carry a steel rod under the seat. I don’t rely on anyone.”

For all the campaigns and slogans about empowerment, there’s no structural shift – no recognition of who drives, who is at risk and who gets to move freely through the city.

The freedom to move is one of the oldest and deepest forms of power. The ability to stop on a street without fear, to speak up without punishment, to be seen without being targeted – that is what’s missing from this version of mobility.

For now, Meena keeps driving. “It’s what I know how to do. It feeds my kids. But don’t call it freedom. Call it survival.”

An informal solidarity

In the face of that silence, some women are trying to organise. Not as unions, because formal unionisation gets you blacklisted, but as WhatsApp groups, informal collectives and night-time alliances.

One such network, SheDrives, helps new women drivers get support when they start. “We warn each other about known abusers. We tell them which spots are safe to stop at night. That’s what solidarity looks like now,” said Razia Sultan, a former Ola driver who now works with a cooperative that only drives women clients.

In December 2022, nearly 200 women drivers protested at Jantar Mantar. They asked for a fixed minimum earning, legal recognition and social security. Within a week, several found their apps deactivated. The companies insisted it was a coincidence.

Whose city, whose platform?

The absence of basic protections, transparent policies and meaningful recourse for gig workers, especially women, reveals a simple truth: the so-called "sharing economy" shares very little with the women who keep it running. The app may be sleek, the branding progressive, the promises generous. But underneath, the machinery is extractive. It works because it treats these women as dispensable.

We can no longer talk about urban mobility, digital India or women’s economic empowerment without reckoning with the structural exclusions that drive women like Meena and Asha into danger every single night.

Scholar Shilpa Phadke’s Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets makes a crucial argument: that access to public space is not just about function, it’s about freedom. When a woman walks, rides or drives through a city, she’s not just commuting. She’s making a claim. But as Phadke and her co-authors show, risk in India is rarely borne collectively. It’s pushed onto women, especially poor women, and even more so if they are from oppressed castes.

Cinema still lags behind in reflecting this truth. Rarely do we see working-class women behind the wheel, navigating not just traffic, but systemic apathy. The Tamil film Seththumaan (2022), produced by Pa. Ranjith, offers a tender portrayal of caste and livelihood but stops short of entering the platform economy. Bollywood films, when they show women drivers at all, tend to romanticise the role while erasing the long hours, the fear and the fatigue.

The stories of these women deserve more than a sympathetic headline. They deserve regulation, recognition and respect. They need laws that account for their realities.

For now, these women continue to drive. It’s time the country stopped treating them as a footnote to the gig economy. They are the story. And they’ve had enough of being invisible.

*Names changed to protect privacy. Interviews conducted between February and June 2025.

Naina Bhargava is a lawyer and founder-editor of The Philosophy Project.

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