Women’s ‘Vetri Payaam’ Starts On Oct. 2

Chennai: The new welfare scheme for women, Vettri Payanam, will be launched on Friday, Gandhi Jayanthi Day by Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay enabling women and transgendered persons to travel completely free of charge on all kinds of 12,692 state-run buses across the State, benefitting 8.4 million women daily facilitating at least 1.6 million journeys.

Meaning ‘victorious journey’, Vettri Payanam, the new scheme is a symbol of social justice as it expands the scope of the existing free travel facility by allowing women to undertake journeys in all buses, unlike the earlier scheme in which it was restricted to ordinary city buses.

Since the government had announced that under the Vettri Payanam scheme, free travel for women will be allowed in express, limited stop services and deluxe buses in corporation, municipal and town panchayats and hill areas across, women all over the State would benefit out of it.

While the ‘Vidiyal Payanam Thittam’, launched by the previous DMK government, helped women undertake free travel in ordinary city buses that are normally known as ‘white board’ buses and not in upgraded bus services like express buses and limited stops services.

Though the DMK said that it was only a name change, the new scheme does not force women to wait for the arrival of the ‘white board’ buses in bus stops sometimes for long hours, giving a miss to express and limited stop buses.

So expanded Vettri Payanam scheme would help women to reach their desired destinations on time in any bus that arrives at the bus stop first.

Under the earlier scheme, women were often forced to hop on to the non-white board buses as they wanted reach their destination on time. So, all women did not benefit fully from it for white board buses were far and few and came once a while.