Women Drivers Left Stranded BluSmart Shuts Down

BluSmart wasn’t just a job to many women; it was a pathway to financial freedom. For Amardeep Kaur, a 35-year-old homemaker, driving for the electric taxi-hailing platform was a way to achieve a household’s first kind of meaningful financial freedom. Lasting only six months, it was the kind of job where short, flexible hours allowed her to juggle the kind of domestic responsibilities one might associate with a stay-at-home mom and a hard-earned source of income, with a kind of dignity you might not associate with driving a taxi.

In contrast to the conventional platforms that insist on extended shifts of 12 hours or more, BluSmart presented something quite rare: well-structured training, reasonable hours, and punctual weekly payments. Not only was it a job, but it was a job that allowed women like Kaur and 22-year-old Priya Thakur, who holds it together after her father passed, to find some semblance of independence and the freedom to navigate life, not just briskly in her electric vehicle, but with the luxury of time, the kind of time that is essentially a moment on life's stage. For Thakur, that stage is an electric vehicle.

Abrupt Closure Sparks Protest

BluSmart's independence was abruptly curtailed on April 16 when, without warning, it ceased operations, leaving in its wake hundreds of newly minted unemployed who had worked for the all-electric cab company. Just a day prior, Gensol Engineering Limited, a related-party company, had been pulled up by the SEBI for diverting funds and for falsifying documents. The complaint against Gensol alleges that the company's promoters, who also are the promoters of BluSmart, misappropriated a whopping ₹262 crore that was meant for procuring the electric vehicles that were to be used by the all-electric cab company.

The reactions were quick and strong. On Sunday, close to 50 former drivers from BluSmart assembled at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, crying out for compensation and government intervention. Most of these people had never done this kind of work before, driving for an app, and most of them, now, were out of work, having had their gigs terminate suddenly.

Women Drivers Left Without Options

Women drivers have taken a particularly bad hit from the closure. Many had learned to drive through BluSmart’s free training programs and were dependent on the company’s vehicles. Competing rideshare platforms like Ola and Uber expect their drivers to own the vehicles they drive, to work long hours, and to do so in a largely unregulated environment, conditions that are not safe for many women.

BluSmart is where Shruti Rajput worked for over a year. In detailing her experience, she explained how fast and effective the company’s responses to harassment and vehicle breakdowns were. She praised it for having a level of accountability that, in her view, other vehicle operators didn’t have. She said that without access to anything near as effective, the vulnerability many drivers now feel is real.

One of the protest organizers, Kamil Hussain, who represents Parivahan Morcha, laid out the drivers' key demands. They seek severance pay equal to three months' earnings, approximately INR 30,000 per month, and laws that would protect gig workers from being abruptly terminated. The protesters also urged the government to take the electric taxis that haven't been used and place them into a state-run cooperative model.