Opinion You can ride the bus, but do you belong? The hidden cost of Delhi’s Pink Passes

When Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade and Sameera Khan wrote Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, they underscored how women’s access to public spaces isn’t just about transit; it’s about the right to linger, to wander without purpose, to belong without justification. For me, Delhi’s pink tickets made that possible. I had the privilege of randomly sitting in any 615 or 621 number bus that commutes between Poorvanchal Hostel and Minto Road or Mori Gate. I would stop at various places that these buses took me, and gradually I learned about other bus routes and would change based on where I had to go next. The whole city became accessible just by sitting on any DTC bus, knowing I don’t have to worry about fare or anyone asking me if I’m a resident of Delhi. The pink ticket handed to me without any qualifications was the ticket that made me feel that I belonged. These DTC buses turned simultaneously into public spaces to engage with the city and a home away from home where I felt “belonged”. From the quiet, tree-lined roads of Lodhi Colony to the chaos and Mughal splendour of purani Dilli, I learned the city not as a tourist but as someone who inhabited it. The bus was where friendships deepened during long rides, where spontaneous detours became adventures, and where the fear of expensive commutes didn’t constrain my mobility. They are my safe way to navigate the city. Now, with the new rule, that freedom is conditional — available only to those who can prove they “belong”.

The term “resident” is a slippery one. Are students living in hostels residents? What about the domestic worker from another state who lives with her employer? Or take the case of the Muslim woman. Many scholars have shown the discrimination that exists in the rental house market, so is she now doubly excluded because she lacks a Delhi Aadhaar? The government’s logic mirrors the insidious “son of the soil” politics that ties rights to paperwork, ignoring how migrants — students, labourers, artists — sustain this city’s economy and culture.

The gradual erosion of public transit services and the constriction of accessible urban spaces stand in stark contrast to the unchecked proliferation of privatised, gated enclaves within Delhi’s urban fabric. Buses, particularly for women, transcend their utilitarian function as mere vehicles of mobility; they constitute a critical site of provisional belonging — a mobile public sphere where the act of commuting itself becomes an assertion of spatial claim. The DTC free bus travel scheme for women, prior to its residency-based restructuring, functioned as both a logistical and symbolic safeguard, offering not just affordability but a sanctioned presence in transit spaces historically fraught with gendered risk. This distinction is crucial when contextualised against Delhi’s long-standing anxieties around women’s mobility, epitomised by the December 2012 gang rape case — a tragedy that unfolded in a private bus, underscoring the differential perceptions of safety between regulated public transit and unaccountable private transport. The revocation of universally accessible pink tickets, therefore, represents more than a fiscal recalibration; it signals a regression in the discursive and material struggle to reimagine cities as spaces where women’s right to move freely is inseparable from their right to inhabit.

Free bus travel was never a “perk”. It was a lifeline. For working women, it meant savings; for students, independence; for slum dwellers, a rare respite from the humiliation of proving they “deserve” basic services. Now, women in informal settlements — often without land records — will be further marginalised. Lack of documentation haunts the city’s temporary settlers, slum dwellers, squatters, residents of shanty settlements, who are pushed everyday to the periphery of exponentially expanding, increasingly privatised boundaries of the city. And now it’s not just housing, their means to travel across the city will also be put in question.

Delhi has never been a city of neat borders or orderly belonging. It thrums with the chaos of a thousand contradictions, a place where rickshaws scrape past Audis, where Delhi Sultanate ruins shadow glass towers, where home isn’t just an address but the smell of winter smog and shared laughter on a crowded bus. It is a city beyond the documented papers, fixed address on Aadhaar card, it’s a city where Muzaffar Hanfi reminded us “yun bhi Dilli mai log rehte hain, jaise divan-e-mir chaak shuda.” Mere documents cannot contain the life that is Delhi.

The writer is a research scholar of Sociology working in Delhi