Publication Category: Policy Papers

Between February and June 2025, Azad Foundation and the Sabar Institute undertook a timely study on the status of public toilets for women and queer persons in Kolkata. This study was born out of years of on-ground experience with women drivers and riders in the transport sector, who consistently highlighted the daily struggles they face because of inadequate restrooms, unhygienic toilets, and inaccessible facilities while navigating the city. As part of a Network – Nari Dibas Udyappan Manch (NDUM) which works with women in unorganized sectors, the Azad team in Kolkata often heard women and queer persons sharing through ‘listening circles’ the challenges faced by them with regard to accessing public toilets.

Our earlier research in Delhi’s DTC depots had already revealed how the absence of safe, clean rest spaces limits women’s ability to work with dignity. These insights made it clear that deeper, city-level studies and audits were urgently needed so that evidence could inform stronger engagement with government departments and spark the creation of truly gender-inclusive urban infrastructure.

With this purpose, Azad Foundation partnered with the Sabar Institute in Kolkata to conduct a comprehensive assessment of public toilet facilities. Supported by students from eight colleges—Gurudas College, Vivekananda College, Victoria Institution, Government Girls’ General Degree College, Bethune College, Sarojini Naidu College, Sister Nivedita College, Shri Shikshayatan College—and two universities—Presidency University and Rabindra Bharati University—the study explored how the availability, quality, and safety of public toilets shape the everyday realities of working women in the city.

The research sought to map the barriers women and queer persons encounter in accessing sanitation: poor cleanliness and hygiene, lack of safety, absence of maintenance, unaffordability, and infrastructural neglect. Importantly, the study also examined how these gaps directly affect women’s participation in the workforce—revealing how substandard sanitation quietly but powerfully pushes women out of public spaces and economic opportunities.

Using a robust mixed-methods design, the research combined large-scale quantitative data with rich qualitative insights. A total of 7,616 participants across most Kolkata Municipal Corporation wards contributed to the survey. Additionally, thirty-eight members of the queer community participated in in-depth interviews, and extensive visual documentation captured the actual condition of public toilet facilities across the city.

The executive brief shares the key findings and recommendations from the study, with the hope that they will inspire meaningful action on the ground. This study stands as one of the most extensive sanitation assessments of its kind in Kolkata. Its findings hold the potential to drive systemic change ensuring that women and gender-diverse communities are no longer forced to choose between safety, dignity, and economic participation simply because of inadequate public infrastructure.

From
Sabar Institute and Azad Foundation

Read the Executive Brief Here

Azad Foundation, established in 2008 in Delhi, is committed to expanding women’s participation in non-traditional livelihoods (NTL) with dignity. Since its inception, the foundation has grown to operate in seven cities across India, directly impacting communities in Delhi, Jaipur, Kolkata, and Chennai, and partnering with organizations in Ahmedabad, Indore, and Bhubaneswar. Through our programs, we have empowered women from marginalized backgrounds with professional driving skills, while our strategic partner, Sakha, has supported their entry into the job market. To date, over 5,000 women have become employable with driving licenses, and more than 3,500 are currently employed as four-wheelers, two-wheelers, and public bus drivers.

Azad Foundation has worked actively to challenge societal and industry norms, breaking barriers to support women’s entry into diverse sectors within transportation. Our collaboration with the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) has enabled training and employment opportunities for women as bus drivers, leading to notable policy adjustments within DTC, including the reduction of height requirements, relaxed heavy vehicle experience prerequisites, and waived training fees for women drivers. Today, 93 women associated with Azad and beyond are either undergoing training or working as bus drivers within DTC in Delhi.

To better understand the workplace environment and support the needs of women bus drivers, Azad initiated research focused on assessing DTC’s facilities for women drivers. This research involved key informant interviews and qualitative case studies with drivers, revealing the need for more gender-inclusive infrastructure within depots. Expanding the research beyond its initial scope, our team conducted a comprehensive audit of DTC depots, developing a specialized assessment tool for this purpose. We extend our sincere gratitude to DTC authorities for their cooperation and support throughout this process.

Read “Building Gender Inclusive Spaces in Public Transport” Policy Brief

The Draft National Policy for Women 2016 proposed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India is refreshing in many aspects and takes on board several concerns of the feminist movements in India, including the need for taking into account unpaid care-work of women, creating more gender disaggregated data and making skill and technology available to all, with a special focus on marginalized women. It makes a reference to the rights and social security of migrant workers and domestic workers, again important concerns for development and feminist activists. However, we would like to bring to the attention of the Government, certain important points.

Read the Recommendations for Draft National Policy 2016

Studies on gender-inclusive transportation have largely focused on the safety of women as commuters and transport users, and there is not much information available about their roles as transport service providers. The ILO (2019) observed that women constituted less than 20% of the global transportation workforce in 2018, as they had limited options in transport-related occupations in all countries. There have been some sporadic, small-scale efforts in some countries, to engage women as public transport bus drivers, including by governments of Ghana, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, and so on. However, these efforts have not been sufficiently documented so as to provide deeper insights into structural factors that impede women’s employment across different roles within this industry.

In order to fill the gap in evidence, about women’s exclusion from being providers of transport, Azad Foundation undertook a rapid qualitative study to analyze critical factors that affect women’s recruitment and retention in public transport as bus drivers. This report documents key findings and highlights critical recommendations to address gender based exclusion in this regard.

Read the Claiming Spaces for Women In Public Transport Advocacy Brief

The development sector’s engagement with poverty alleviation and gender equality has evolved considerably over the past 40 years. Significant efforts have been made to accommodate theoretical advancements in the broader field of gender and development. Programs designed to empower women – and men in some settings – have evolved from the welfare, efficiency and equity focused-approaches of the 1970s and 1980s to the more recent empowerment, human rights and capabilities-based approaches of the 1990s and the new millennium. Because of a broader structural understanding of the sources of women’s poverty and disempowerment, today many more actors in development engage, not just with employment and labour force participation as means to empower women, but also with more politically-sensitive issues (i.e. property rights, political participation and the gendered division of household labour, to name a few) that they had previously been hesitant or unwilling to take on.

These progressive shifts have sometimes paradoxically occurred alongside changes that construct poverty alleviation and gender equality less as complex structural issues and more as technical-rational topics that can be addressed through a bureaucratic approach to development management and practice. There has been a gradual shift away from a political understanding of the causes of poverty and gender inequality to an apolitical and ahistorical management of its symptoms (Ramalingam 2013). The widespread use within donor agencies, government organizations, charities and even NGOs of the language and logic of business management – through, for example, tools such as Results Based Management (RBM) and Logical Framework Analysis (LFA) – has had a profound impact not just upon how development is conceptualised and operationalised but also upon the operational cultures and management styles of organizations working on the ground to alleviate poverty and promote gender equality. Consequently, these actors increasingly understand development more as a managerial issue that can be planned, carried out and evaluated within short periods of time, rather than as a messy, unpredictable process of social change.

Of course, it is important to remember that the technical-rational approach and the political approach are not entirely antithetical. Actors that understand development as a political process can nonetheless support a careful thinking through of the logical “theories of change,” and recognise that in a context of scarce resources, a focus on efficient and effective use of resources is a serious responsibility for those supporting change. The two strategies do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Read the Research Paper here