Stigmatized buses, world-class metro: how gendered surveillance shapes public transport in Karachi and Delhi

The issue of women’s safety in public transport remains a formidable urban challenge, with surveillance often taking a center stage in the discourse around solutions. Engaging with these debates, we argue in this article that gendered surveillance in Karachi buses and Delhi metro contributes to polarizing perceptions of these modes of transport in popular imagination, which then get instrumentalized to shape urban mobility according to the desires of the dominant groups. In Karachi, the gendered surveillance of women through gaze stigmatizes the bus as a dangerous space for women, which makes its neglect, underfunding, and slow death broadly acceptable, despite its many benefits. In Delhi, the gendered surveillance for women through CCTV cameras presents the metro as a world-class solution for women’s safety, which should be defended and expanded, irrespective of its numerous flaws. We claim this narrow focus on women’s safety from bodily harm and the weaponization of the stigma/world-class perceptions undermines the mobility of working-class people and other marginalized groups who, in Karachi, have to commute in a rundown system and in Delhi are economically and socially excluded from the system. Taking seriously the power of competing perceptions in citymaking, we propose the need to center the experiences and desires of all those who use and need public transport the most.