Cruising 10,000 km across India for a cause, Biking Queens receive praise from PM
Gujarat's 'Biking Queens' called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi after successfully covering 10,000 km to create social awareness on issues that disturbed them. They covered 15 states in 45 days, building a narrative on schemes like Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao and Swachh Bharat.
The group included more than 50 women from all walks of life, including IAS aspirants, housewives, doctors, engineers, and students. Though they come from different backgrounds with different battles to fight, what unites them is their passion for biking and the desire to use it for the greater good. In an interview with Hindustan Times, one of the riders, Nancy Patiwalaa, said,
“The government has introduced many schemes which have yielded results up to some extent in urban pockets but there is no significant impact in rural pockets.”
She is interested in using education to empower women in rural parts of India.
Like Nancy, each woman part of the group wants to fight for and build conversations about a cause she is passionate about, and they travelled the length and breadth of India to do just that.
Biking is always associated with men, and it was to break this barrier that these women chose it as their medium. This way they could also reach more people from the interior parts of India which would have been impossible with other means of transport.
At the end of their 10,000-km-long ride, they hoisted the national flag at Khardung La in Ladakh on August 15. The hoisting of the flag on India's highest motorable road was to reiterate the equal status that women deserve in society.
The causes that they built dialogue around include female foeticide, gender inequality, and education for girl children, among other things.
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