Forty-year-old woman becomes first driver. For the first time, a female driver has been offered the opportunity to serve on a nearly a century-old bus service for public transport in Mumbai, India’s largest city. In Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, the largest bus service company operating since 1926 has hired a woman driver for the first time, while shortlisting two more women for driving.
According to the Times of India, the launch of powerful long buses for the public in Mumbai started almost a century ago and the buses were changed several times during this journey.
Buses operating as public transport in Mumbai also have cultural significance and have been featured in many Bollywood films. Long buses can carry 150 people at a time and even now there are 50 year old buses running in Mumbai, on which millions of people travel daily.
For the first time in 96 years, a private company, one of the largest companies operating old-style buses, has hired a woman driver who first learned to drive a rickshaw six years ago. The company, which operates about 400 buses in Mumbai, has set a new record by appointing 41-year-old Lakshmi Yadav as the first female driver, while the company has also shortlisted two more female drivers for the job.
The buses plying in Mumbai have cultural significance, they have been shown in movies too. The company already employs 90 women as conductors in its buses, while several women are also employed in managerial positions and some are working as mechanics.
The company plans to significantly increase the number of female drivers in the next few years. The woman hired by the company as a driver is married and has two children and their children are studying engineering.
Before getting a job as a bus driver, bus driver Lakshmi Yadav also learned to drive expensive and luxurious cars, with BMW and Fortune topping the list.
Although Lakshmi Yadav has become the first female driver of Mumbai’s public buses, women have been seen driving public transport in various cities of India before her, while Pratiksha Das, a 24-year-old girl from Mumbai, learned to drive a bus in 2019. However, he did not take the job. Pratiksha Das learned to drive a bus in 2019 but did not get a job as a driver.
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