Opinion Enough is enough — we need safer cities for women

Pune. Kolkata. Delhi. There is a clear pattern. A few cases gather national media attention. Outrage follows. And then we fall into the same trap of demanding quick justice, failing to address the larger, structural challenges of building an ecosystem to create safer cities for women. Importantly, this failure continues despite political commitment to women’s safety at all levels of the state machinery. Government agencies, police, and municipal and transport authorities need little to no convincing of the gravity of the issue. There is broad support for infrastructure and services in public spaces and public transport to enhance women’s safety. Moreover, even specific interventions are well documented and well known, especially through flagship knowledge products such as the World Bank’s toolkit on Enabling Gender Responsive Urban Mobility and Public Spaces.

So, then, what is the problem? First, there is a lack of analysis of data on crimes against women in public places. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) provides statistics on crimes against women where an FIR was filed at a national level. However, this data doesn’t contain a separate category on crimes against women in public places. It also doesn’t include the mountain of incidents that go unreported. Private foundations, such as the Red Dot Foundation, collect anonymous data on street harassment, even recording the type of harassment, the time of the incident, and the location. Similar data is now being collected by government mobile applications and helplines for women’s safety in several cities. To design systems that are optimised for prevention, this data needs to be used systematically for preventive measures and rapid response systems. Provisions for gender-responsive infrastructure in the physical locations where there is a higher incidence of criminal activity — be it more lighting, patrolling, eyes on the street or other infrastructure-based interventions — are urgently required as well.

The second factor is about women’s representation in the police. As per the India Justice Report 2022, women form about eight per cent of police officers in the country. We’ve probably reached this number in the first place due to consistent directives issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs to target the 33 per cent representation threshold. Further, the Central government aims to establish at least one all-women police station in each district. Achieving these requires partnerships and some action on the part of state governments as well. Cities like Delhi, Kochi, Chennai, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, and Hyderabad have established all-women police units, pink patrols and SHE Teams to enhance women’s safety in public places. This is an important start. However, a mass recruitment drive of women police officers is required so that such teams can be scaled up across the country.

Third — women’s presence in public places. It’s 2025. And women are still fighting for their right to be present in public spaces. Walking on a road is fraught with threats, even more so after daylight hours. Policy measures must be pushed to increase women’s presence in public places. State governments and municipal authorities can support this by ensuring that street vending spaces are allocated to women vendors through a combination of quotas and financial subsidies. Public transport authorities such as metro corporations in Chennai, Bengaluru, Kochi, Mumbai, the National Capital Region Transport Corporation (NCRTC), and the Kochi Water Metro are working to increase the number of women in their staff. A few bus transport corporations, like in Delhi, Pune, and Bhubaneswar, amongst others, are also starting special drives to recruit women bus drivers and conductors. Again, these efforts need to be institutionalised and expanded.

Fourth, there is a lack of gender-sensitive infrastructure. A dark corner can appear suddenly when walking on a well-lit road. High walls can create visibility concerns. Washrooms can be absent at stations when you need them the most. Or, even if present, they could be unusable. The list goes on. Cities like Delhi and Chennai have begun undertaking safety audits and fixing infrastructure gaps in response to these audits. After this attack, the MSRTC is also starting safety audits. Moving forward, there is an urgent need to establish institutional systems for regular, and not one-time, safety audits of infrastructure across public spaces, especially involving women from local communities.

The fifth and final point is regarding budgets and expanding the Nirbhaya programme. Over the past decade, since its inception, the Nirbhaya programme has allocated nearly Rs 7,200 crore to various programmes, and utilised more than three-fourths of this allocation on infrastructure upgrades, CCTVs, and other services to enhance women’s safety. Women’s police personnel, public transport authorities, and municipal corporations are heavily reliant on funds from the Nirbhaya programme for their work on women’s safety. Going forward, there is a need to expand the Nirbhaya Fund to cover a larger set of cities and initiatives at a national scale. The Fund may also be opened to philanthropic organisations and corporate social responsibility foundations to expand its corpus. The private sector should also be looped in for expertise to scale solutions that work to enhance women’s safety.

In the time between Nirbhaya and Abhaya, some work has been done, but not enough. This Women’s Day, we need the state and the public’s commitment and investment in women’s safety, and we need it now.

The writer is founder, Nikore Associates