Putting Women in the Driver's Seat in India
In India, 8 in 10 women experience harassment while commuting — a statistic that doesn't shock so much as confirm what most women already know. And it does something quietly devastating: it limits where women go, what jobs they take, and how freely they move through their own cities.
Vindhya Mehrotra co-founded Fery Rides not from a market gap analysis, but from a friend's experience of harassment on a routine commute. Her response was to build a solution at the intersection of three problems no one was solving together: women's safety, women's livelihoods, and sustainable urban transport.
The idea is simple and radical at the same time. Every Sister Partner is a trained, background-verified woman driver. Every vehicle is electric. Every ride is designed to feel like what one passenger described as "a moment of relief and peace of mind." Since launching, Fery has completed over 65,000 rides, served more than 50,000 women passengers, and onboarded over 250 Sister Partners earning flexible, dignified incomes — across on-demand EV two-wheeler rides and scheduled EV cab services.
But getting a woman driver onto the road requires more than a platform. It requires equipment, training, and confidence. That's where Giving Joy came in.
With our $500 Giving Joy microgrant, Fery equipped 10 new Sister Partners (in photos) with everything they needed to get on the road safely from day one: helmets, safety kits, mobile phone mounts for navigation, and EV charging accessories. Alongside the gear, Fery ran self-defense training sessions focused on personal safety awareness, situational response, and confidence-building — creating a supportive space where drivers could share experiences and learn from each other.
One Sister Partner put it plainly: “After the training and receiving my safety gear, I felt significantly more confident navigating traffic and interacting with customers. My ride performance improved. My earnings became more consistent. A $500 grant changed the trajectory of mywork.”
The Ripple Effect
10 Sister Partners onboarded, equipped, and deployed
3,000–4,000 women passengers reached every month by these drivers alone
In just 4 months, Fery grew from 1 pilot cab to a fleet of 9, completing 3,000+ rides
And it keeps spreading. Every Sister Partner who gets on the road creates a ripple: safer travel for passengers, a steady income for her family, and living proof to other women in her community that this path is possible. Each ride is a small act of freedom — for the woman behind the wheel and the woman in the seat.
Mobility Is Freedom
That's what Vindhya believes. And it's what Giving Joy believes too that when you remove the right barrier at the right moment, the impact goes far beyond what any spreadsheet can capture.
A helmet. A safety kit. A training session. For one Sister Partner, that was the difference between staying home and getting on the road. For thousands of passengers, it's the difference between traveling in fear and traveling in peace.