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By:

Akhilesh Sinha

25 June 2025 at 2:53:54 pm

Driving Change

Once trapped by poverty and abuse, Sufina found freedom behind the wheel — and now helps women travel safely across Delhi. The woman who once felt unsafe is now ensuring women travellers get home securely from Delhi’s airport, day or night. Among those providing this round-the-clock service is Sufina, a cab driver with the “Driven by Women for Women and Families” initiative. Sufina, who now offers peace of mind and safe journeys to female passengers, was once deeply troubled herself. But she...

Driving Change

Once trapped by poverty and abuse, Sufina found freedom behind the wheel — and now helps women travel safely across Delhi. The woman who once felt unsafe is now ensuring women travellers get home securely from Delhi’s airport, day or night. Among those providing this round-the-clock service is Sufina, a cab driver with the “Driven by Women for Women and Families” initiative. Sufina, who now offers peace of mind and safe journeys to female passengers, was once deeply troubled herself. But she refused to give up. Pulling herself out of hardship, she not only became self-reliant but also an inspiration for marginalised women in society. Partnering with the Sakha-Azaad Foundation, Sufina has scripted an extraordinary story. Sakha Consulting Wings launched this women-driven cab service for female passengers under the brand  Women with Wheels . All drivers, including Sufina, received training in driving and self-defence through the Azaad Foundation. Born Into Hardship Living in East Delhi’s Anand Vihar, Sufina was married to a daily wage labourer at just 16. By 18, she was a mother. Poverty was crushing; meals were often scarce. Desperate to escape this misery, she began searching for a way out. That was when she met a Sakha volunteer who suggested driver training. It became the turning point in her life. The road ahead, however, was anything but easy. Breaking Free Sufina was stepping into a male-dominated world, and it frightened her at first. Yet her hunger for financial independence gave her courage. In the early days, she faced strong opposition from both her husband and parents. Before leaving for work, her husband would beat her and lock her inside the room to stop her from attending training. But Sufina refused to surrender. Teaming up with her mother, she found a way out. After her husband left for work, her mother would unlock the door. Before he returned, Sufina would quietly slip back home to avoid more conflict. After completing her training, she worked as a private driver for nearly two years, continuing the same routine. As her earnings, confidence and independence grew, so did her assertiveness — and with it, her husband’s suspicion. One day, when he raised his hand again, Sufina fought back. She told him she would not tolerate it anymore. Shocked, he stopped. He never hit her again. Driving Change Sufina believes the turning point in her marriage came when her husband fell seriously ill. She admitted him to a private nursing home and paid for his treatment from her own savings. From then on, he began trusting her and valuing her work. Though the struggle had been painful, Sufina emerged stronger. She now asks a powerful question:  Why must a woman endure so much just to prove herself? Today, she is determined that her daughters should grow up with freedom and choice. In her community, she is respected and admired. Local girls and women see in her a path to self-reliance and dignity. The woman who once lived in fear now helps other women travel without it — and in doing so, she is driving change far beyond Delhi’s roads.

How do I manage my household waste?

Updated: Oct 22, 2024

household waste

So friends, in my last week’s article, I wrote about the suffering of poor cows when they innocently and unknowingly consume plastic bags with left over food inside. These plastic bags are unwanted materials in their stomachs. Cows and all such animals have a stomach made up of four chambers. It is equipped to digest only the grasses and other vegetation or similar type of nutritious food meant for them.

Obviously, plastic is not their food. The poor cows then fall sick and are unable to carry on with there lives unless some good souls, notice the bulging bellies of these animals and take them to a veterinary surgeon to perform a surgery and take out all that plastic stuff out of their stomachs. There are such groups spread across who take care of such sick cows. There are records indicating that the vets have removed anywhere between 20 kilograms to 80 kilograms of plastic bags from cow’s stomachs. And we are responsible for this.

Another issue with plastic material lying in the garbage heap is that, this plastic does not remain contained within that heap. Being much lighter in weight, it gets carried away due to wind or rainwater. It will eventually settle in the nallahs and gutters and will flow into smaller and then larger waterbodies like rivers, creeks and estuaries, only to find its way into our oceans and seas. Lot more about plastic waste will eventually appear in this column. Furthermore, different types of flies, including the houseflies also get attracted to this garbage.

The flies that visit the garbage are also the same flies that roam around your lunch buffet and drop their offsprings on your plate. By doing so, they increase the risk of you contracting with salmonella, which causes typhoid fever, food poisoning, enteric fever, gastroenteritis, and other major illnesses. Besides flies, other animals that thrive from the garbage in and around the containers include rats and stray dogs. They have tremendous potential to spread the germs of many dreadful diseases in human population.

Apart from these animals, the rag pickers keep on visiting such garbage heaps frequently to retrieve the useful and saleable materials, article from it so that they can earn their daily bread and butter. These rag pickers are at very high risk of getting infected, and injured while handling sharp objects like broken glass bottle or sharp metallic objects. Such heaps of garbage are major sources of air pollution, which causes various respiratory diseases and other adverse health effects as contaminants are absorbed from lungs into other parts of the body.

The toxic substances in air contaminated by waste include carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane. In everyday life we identify the polluted air especially through bad odors, which are usually caused by decomposing and liquid waste items that are part of such garbage heaps.

All in all, such heaps of garbage strewn on the roadside in various parts of the city has become an eyesore for the passersby and people living in the area.

(The writer is an environment specialist. Views personal.)

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