WOW: Women in Punjab to get 700 motorbikes

LAHORE: The Punjab government’s Women on Wheels (WoW) program is to distribute 700 motorbikes among working women, students and women associated with small businesses on subsidized rates to make their travel easier.
This will not only help empower females but will also help to end the social taboos established in society that “women are not fit for every job,” Salman Soofi, director general, Chief Minister Strategic Reforms Unit (SRU) Punjab, told Arab News.
The SRU is distributing the motorbikes to the women to give them easier mobility for their colleges, offices and business places.
The program is one of the components of the SRU’s women-centric reforms and the provincial transport department and the Bank of Punjab (BoP) are the partners in it.
The government of Punjab is providing 100 percent of the markup of the motorbike alongside a subsidy of Rs 24, 975 ($216).
The WoW program is being started in five big cities of the province of Punjab: Lahore, Sargodha, Faisalabad, Multan and Rawalpindi, and 700 graduate women have been selected to receive motorbikes on subsidized rates.
The program will be officially started with a big rally of the women bike-riders in the second week of May.
The SRU envisages that this initiative will bring about a change of attitude toward women in society. It will also help to empower them as they will not have to depend on family members to travel.
“This program will not only break taboos that women can’t drive motorbikes but gives them the power of mobility to be anything they want to be: a businesswoman, a student, a professional or a housewife with the ability to take care of her household,” Soofi told Arab News.
Women activists believe that it is a step toward prosperity, and self-reliance that opens the door of progress for women.
Mumtaz Mughal, director of the Aurat Foundation, told Arab News that several women’s issues are related to mobility as they feel insecure while traveling on public transport: “Having their own conveyance will make them independent and they will feel free to go their places of work that certainly would lead to their prosperity.”