In the driving seat: India's school for female taxi drivers

Twenty-three-year-old Seema laughs during a driving exercise. Photograph: Casillas/REX Shutterstock

Order a cab in London, Mumbai, New York or Beijing, and chances are the driver will be a man. Female taxi drivers remain rare wherever you go, probably even more so in the cities where women and girls are most at risk of sexual assault on public transport.

Pooja chauffeurs a female client during her night shift.

All photographs by Claudio Montesano Casillas / Rex Features

For one pioneering nonprofit organisation in India, which was last year ranked as the fourth most dangerous country in the world for a woman to take public transport, the answer is simple, practical and radical: put more women in the driver’s seat.

After working for a year as a private chauffeur, Meenu will be able to apply for a commercial licence.

Women on Wheels, based in Delhi and now rolled out to Jaipur and Kolkata, has trained dozens of women to become taxi drivers. Over an eight-month course the students – invariably poor from surrounding slums - learn English, self defence, CPR, communication skills, and obtain their first driver’s licence. For many, their first ID card. After spending a year as a full-time chauffeur for a family they apply for a commercial licence and go on to work for a taxi firm that only employs women drivers.

Pushpa changes a flat tyre as part of a driving workshop outside New Delhi.

Claudio Montesano Casillas’s intimate and low-key photographs tell this story through the courage of individual women who have decided, often without telling anyone for fear of recrimination, to become taxi drivers. To enter what is traditionally seen - and not just in India - as an exclusively male occupation. The photos, seemingly natural and unposed, mark everyday moments on the road or in training.

Hemlata changes a flat tire as part of a professional driving workshop.

A close-up of the back of a woman’s head as she crouches down to change a tyre. The view out of a windscreen as a driver adjusts her rear view mirror and a man on the street watches her. A student frowning in concentration as she throws punches in a self-defence class.

A Women on Wheels student participates in a self-defence course in Jaipur.

The proud and determined expression of a qualified driver, one hand resting on the wheel of her car. There is perhaps no other city in the world that needs a project like Women on Wheels as much as Delhi, whereviolence against women has grown to endemic proportions.

Fellow drivers at a traffic light ask 19-year-old Meenu why she’s driving.

On average 4o crimes against women are registered daily by Delhi police, including at least four cases of rape. Earlier this year an Uber taxi driver was convicted of raping a female passenger in the city. And it was in Delhi, in 2012, that a 23-year-old woman was fatally gang-raped by six men on a bus, sparking an international outcry and protests across India.

Twenty-eight-year-old Pushpa tries to park the car within the red cones during a reverse parking exercise.

Training women to become taxi drivers in a country where more than half of the 5.5 million women who enter the workforce each year express serious concern for the safety of their commute doesn’t just benefit and empower the women who are driving. It makes the woman in the passenger seat safer, too.

Meenu’s relatives look up to her now that she works as a driver. Her mother is thinking about enrolling in the Women on Wheels course.