Nirupama Sekhri

By redesigning truck terminals into modern well-equipped centers that cater to the needs, rights, and safety of the drivers, Nirupama Sekhri is systematizing India's trucking industry.

Over the years, the trucking industry in India has developed in a disorganized, fragmented manner whose main aim is minimizing costs and maximizing profits. Drivers have been exploited by transport owners and truck operators, as well by the government, which has overlooked its duty to ensure safety.
Having identified truck terminals as the primary centers where drivers, operators, and owners congregate, Nirupama is redesigning these terminals to create trucker-friendly centers that will cater to the needs of the drivers and encourage them to take up issues like safety and rights.
Nirupama's intervention is not only timely but also–able potentially–to spread far with the growing geographic expansion of the newer truck terminals. The government of India is currently moving many existing city terminals to new suburban locations.

In India the trucking industry carries over 70 percent of the country's total freight traffic. It is second only to the agriculture industry in the number of people it employs nationwide.

Yet the trucking industry remains invisible to policymakers, in part because of to the nature of a trucker's career. Truckers are primarily independent workers; always in transit, they have limited interaction with each other. Additionally, truck drivers in India have short career spans; irregular hours and long drives impose a heavy toll on their health. As a result, drivers tend to have intense but brief careers, during which they earn as much as they can, paying little heed to longer-term issues affecting truckers generally. Because of this individualistic, opportunistic approach, the industry has developed in a fragmented manner, with profit as its primary driver. In the absence of powerful voices or multinational lobbies, the government, too, has turned a blind eye to the needs of the industry–especially in the area of safety–while continuing to benefit from the various poll and road taxes.

Until now, truck owners have considered only their short-term profits rather than the long-term efficacy of the system, which in its current state exacts high costs in terms of money and life.

Adopting a participatory approach, Nirupama is looking at citizen-based solutions to the existing problems that plague the trucking industry. Typically in India, truck owners purchase allotted space from the government at truck terminals. Nirupama works within the truck terminals–with truck owners, operators, and drivers–to create links among this group and awareness of problems within the industry itself. Through grassroots education, Nirupama brings in the necessary players to work collectively toward solving their problems through action and advocacy. In her efforts, she uses the expertise of other nonprofit organizations and of corporations with direct links to the industry (like chassis-building companies) to introduce services that improve the environmental, economic, and equity-related terminals' conditions. Nirupama wishes to document the process of change in a manual that can be used at truck terminals across the country.

She is also working with other transport-related organizations to advocate for the introduction of "Intelligent Transport Systems"–technology-enabled transport systems that would vastly improve the existing road safety systems of the industry.

Nirupama was brought up in the army cantonment in the small town of Dehradun. Her father was in the army, and her mother was a teacher in one of the best and most expensive schools in the country. Being from a middle-class family, Nirupama's mother took a teaching job to provide her two daughters a good education–a teacher's children could study in the school for free. Nirupama's mother, a great influence in her life, encouraged her to live her life on her own terms. After graduating with a degree in English literature, Nirupama decided to work as an airline flight attendant to fulfill her wish to travel. A keen self-learner, she explored every city in which she stopped. After working and traveling for six years, she returned home to work for a nonprofit organization focused on preserving India's cultural heritage. It was her fascination with indigenous communities and a suggested reading on freight and its place in the country that led her to research the trucking industry. Soon after, she decided to journey with truck drivers across the country to get an account of their experiences. Accompanied by a British photographer-friend, she traveled across the truck routes of the country, moving from one truck to another in an unplanned manner, sharing the lives of the drivers.

From her truck-traveling experience, she ended up at the transport terminal outside New Delhi where she lives with her mother. The city serves as the base for her work.