Cycle With Kochi: Homemakers learn to ride a cycle and live a dream

In a bid to promote green commuting, Cochin Corporation’s ‘Cycle With Kochi’ project is training Kudumbashree women to cycle

Zeenath Shihab learned to cycle when she turned 44. A mother of two 20-year-olds, she overcame family reservations and enrolled in Cochin Corporation’s ‘Cycle With Kochi’ programme.  “I feel thrilled at realising my childhood dreams. Today my family is proud of me and my parents are pleased,” says Zeenath. She is from the first batch of 160 women who are being trained to bicycle under the project that strives to empower economically weaker women and high school girls in Kochi.  

Aimed at moulding a generation of cyclists that will change the environment and eco system of the city in the coming years, the programme is already changing lives.

Like Zeenath, another middle-aged woman, who prefers to not disclose her identity, had to face ridicule from the men of her family who betted against her ability to learn the skill. They vowed to tonsure their heads if she was successful. Beating the odds, she is now a confident cyclist.

After learning to cycle, Lincy KS, a homemaker and mother of two grown up children, has bought herself a cycle. “I now have the freedom to go anywhere I like and not depend on anyone,” says Lincy, who was encouraged by her family. It was the family’s economic condition that prevented her parents to buy a bicycle when she was a child. Lincy found the training difficult, especially the initial “balancing.”

In 2017 The Integrated Sustainable Urban Transport Systems for Smart Cities (SMART-SUT) project was launched in three cities- Kochi, Coimbatore and Bhuvaneshwar. In February 2021, Kochi mayor, Anil Kumar, declared 2021 as the ‘Year of Green Urban Mobility’. Later in October, 2021, ‘Cycle With Kochi’ programme was launched to promote cycling as a preferred mode of commuting across all the 74 wards of Kochi. A collaboration between Kochi Municipal Corporation (KMC), CSML(Cochin Smart City Mission Limited) and C- HED (Centre for Heritage, Environment and Development), the project is underway in eight grounds across the city, with a trainer allocated to each ground. GIZ, a German firm, is supporting the project by providing research and technology assistance.

Spokesperson of GIZ, discloses that while Kochi has everything going for it to have cycling as a green mobility option, what it lacks is on the ground riders. “When we found that there is a dearth of riders who use the bicycle for daily work, we came up with the idea of training Kudumbashree women workers to cycle.” The second batch of 112 women will begin training in six grounds from March 26.

One of the trainers, a 22-year-old B Com graduate, Anna Job, volunteered to teach Kudumbashree women to cycle, when she learned about the project. “Teaching older people to cycle is not the same as teaching a child, so we had a one-day training programme,” says Anna, adding that the two biggest barriers she found while teaching the older women were ‘fear’ and “age-related inhibition”. “Many faced ridicule from their families but many had their support too,” she says. One of the first things she was taught to do was continuously motivate them. The first day was learning to balance with one leg touching the ground.