Improving Commute Options for Women Workers in the Chakan Auto Cluster

On 21 November 2025, Good Business Lab (GBL) convened a roundtable in Chakan, Pune, with automotive and auto-component firms to discuss commute barriers faced by women workers and explore whether pooled transport could be a viable solution. The insights below reflect perspectives shared during the roundtable, complemented by GBL’s ongoing research.

Transport is one of the most decisive factors shaping women’s access to industrial jobs and their ability to stay in them. Long commutes, weak last-mile connectivity, and unsafe travel windows (early mornings and late nights) can make a job impractical for them. For the automotive sector, transport is therefore less a “benefit” and more a gating condition for scaling women’s shopfloor participation.

Drawing on GBL’s broader research under its Women in Automotive initiative—spanning 32 firms, over 250 interviews with workers, managers, and executives, and large-scale surveys with women seeking jobs in the automotive sector—a consistent pattern emerges. Women often prefer roles that offer employer-provided transport and report feeling significantly safer when it is available. In one hiring survey, more than three-quarters of interviewed women said they preferred jobs that included company transport.

Our willingness-to-pay survey with 200+ women adds another lens. In hypothetical scenarios, women were willing to trade roughly 10% of their monthly pay for employer-provided transportation. Qualitative conversations reinforced the point that reliable transport influences retention and can also shape whether families approve of women’s decision to work in the first place.

Against this backdrop, the roundtable focused on a practical question: can pooled or joint transport models make women’s commutes safer and more feasible, while remaining practical and attractive for firms

What the discussion surfaced

Transport is increasingly being treated as workforce infrastructure. Participants described transport as a foundational enabler rather than a discretionary perk. In the Chakan context, limited public transport options and safety concerns mean many women cannot reach factories without employer support.

Night shifts are where gender targets meet operational reality. Most participating firms reported women comprising roughly 5–35% of shopfloor workers, alongside aspirations to move closer to 50%. Yet women remain concentrated in day shifts, and night-shift deployment is still rare. A shared concern was that without credible pooling solutions for safe night-shift commutes, gender targets may remain difficult to achieve in practice.

Despite strong intent, scaling transport remains challenging. Firms discussed why transport can be hard to implement and scale reliably, even when intent is strong. Participants outlined the requirements under Maharashtra’s Factory Rules for women’s night shifts, including restricted hours, door-to-door transport, security arrangements (including women security staff), a minimum share of women supervisors, and reporting obligations to authorities. Several firms also described additional safeguards, such as GPS tracking, panic buttons, or SOS devices, as important protections that are costly and operationally demanding to implement consistently.

Liability and accountability concerns surfaced repeatedly. Many firms worry less about the transport line-item in their budget and more about what happens if something goes wrong during a night commute, and how responsibility is assigned across vendors and potentially across firms.

Pooled transport drew interest, with clear conditions. Participants responded positively to pooled transport in principle, particularly for its potential to expand hiring catchment areas and improve fleet utilisation. At the same time, firms were clear that pooling would only be viable if it did not increase risk exposure and continued to meet compliance requirements. Conditions raised included geographically sensible pooling, safety standards at least as strong as current stand-alone systems, reliability guarantees, and explicit clarity on liability.

The group also referenced “anchor models” already operating in practice, including pooling within a group company, women-only night buses with defined escalation procedures, and hybrid fleets that use cars for door-to-door drops. These examples suggest that complex systems can be run safely; the harder question is adapting them across multiple firms without pre-existing group relationships.

Closing reflections

The roundtable added weight to the insight from GBL’s wider work: safe, reliable transport appears closely tied to women’s ability to access and sustain shopfloor employment. At the same time, the discussion made clear why transport remains difficult to scale. Compliance requirements, liability concerns, and operational complexity are significant.

Pooled transport did not emerge as a silver bullet. Instead, it surfaced as an exploratory pathway that could be worth testing – provided it is designed around safety, compliance, and trust rather than framed as a simple efficiency measure.

What comes next?

Participants expressed openness to continued collaboration in three directions:

• Focused pilot design with a small cluster of nearby firms to test pooled routes where feasibility is highest.

• Structured engagement with relevant public authorities to clarify how pooled transport can comply with current regulations while improving safety outcomes.

• Deeper worker-facing research and co-design, especially with women in night and second shifts, to define what “safe and dignified commute” means in practice.

Under the Gender Champions Consortium, we are taking this forward as an evidence-building effort, supporting design, learning, and coordination rather than operating transport systems directly. We are already continuing conversations with interested firms to explore potential pilots and collaboration pathways. If you are interested in partnering on research, design, or pilots related to women’s commutes and pooled transport in industrial clusters, reach out to us at gccsecretariat@goodbusinesslab.org.