by Sutapa Sanyal
Sexual harassment during commuting is a very commonplace occurrence as revealed by various studies and researches and has an incidence as high as 90%. Such incidents affect the lives of female commuters in more ways than one can normally imagine.
The Prakoshth is working with traffic police, auto drivers, city bus drivers and conductors as well as school bus drivers with the help of an NGO in order to make public transport a safe option for women and girls who form a significant percentage of commuters.
The curriculum of these gender sensitization workshops consist of flagging the issues related to gender through talks and visuals, coupled with gender-related games, enacting of street- plays related to the topic and an interactive question-answer session.
Feedbacks from the participants are an indicator to the fact they are willing to assume the mantle of stakeholders and “change agents” in the process of creating awareness regarding gender issues and walking the talk too.
This program has been linked with the RU BA RU program to cover the gender-sensitization of the bus drivers and conductors of the school buses and vans.