Meet Priyanka and Pooja, the women who piloted Lucknow Metro's maiden run

Lucknow Metro Rail Corporation intends to give equal opportunities to women in operating the Metro service

Priyanka Chaurasia, 21, never had an opportunity to drive a car while she was studying in her hometown, Mirzapur, in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Or even later, when she moved to Lucknow for higher studies. Same for Agra girl, Pooja Rathore, also 21, says that her family did not own a four-wheeler.

But, when the Lucknow Metro Rail made its maiden commercial run on September 5, it was these two feisty young women who piloted it with Uttar Pradesh Governor Ram Naik, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and the state’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, on board.

Chaurasia and Rathore are among the battery of women loco pilots for India’s latest Metro service, which is also the fastest completed project in the country. The Metro service reached the commercial run stage within three years of work starting on it. Lucknow Metro is also the only Metro service in India that commenced its services with women operators in the driver’s seat.

Currently, Lucknow Metro operates four trains over its priority 8.5-km route connecting the Lucknow Airport with the Charbagh railway station. Civil work on the other sections is underway and the 23-km north-south corridor is expected to be fully completed and operational by March 2019.

When Lucknow Metro had started its trial runs on the priority section in December 2016, then, too, the train was piloted by two women: Pratibha Sharma and Prachi Sharma, both from Allahabad. The trial run was flagged off by the previous chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, in the presence of his father, Mulayam Singh Yadav, and wife, Dimple, on December 1.

Chaurasia had moved to Lucknow to pursue a diploma in electrical engineering after completing her intermediate course from Mirzapur district. While her family tried to coax her into doing BTech, she preferred to go to Allahabad in 2015 to prepare for competitive exams. Similarly, Rathore did a diploma in electrical engineering from Agra after completing intermediate studies with physics, chemistry and math as her subjects.

When the Lucknow Metro Rail Corporation advertised for the post of station controller-cum-train operators towards the end of the 2015-16 financial year, Chaurasia and Rathore were among the candidates who applied for it. They were selected after a written test in March 2016.

“I feel happy at my achievement that I could operate the sleekly-designed Lucknow Metro at this young age,” says Rathore who wants to eventually get back to academics. “It has given me a lot of confidence and has encouraged me to do even better in the future.”

Rathore has become a celebrity of sorts in her locality and in her social circle back in her hometown, Agra. She admits that the initial days of living alone in Lucknow, away from her family, were far from easy. “I was petrified of the idea of working in Lucknow and living alone. But now I am gaining confidence.” For Chaurasia, the feeling of piloting the Metro rail on the elevated route was almost like flying. “My only ambition was to do something unique, and I believe that I have managed to accomplish that to some extent. But I dream of achieving much more than this,” she says.

The Lucknow Metro Rail Corporation intends to give equal opportunities to women in operating the hi-tech Metro rail service. Its managing director, Kumar Keshav, had said that the corporation was a progressive organisation that espoused equal opportunities for both male and female candidates.

The corporation had floated 97 vacancies for the post of station controller-cum-train operators. It attracted 3,827 applications from women candidates alone. That was about 20 per cent of the total number of applications received for the post.

The corporation eventually recruited 21 women candidates for the post, in keeping with the UP government policy of 20 per cent reservation for women in government jobs.