Make Every City and Community Safe for Women

A woman’s freedom should not depend on whether she feels safe enough to walk to work, use public transport, exercise in a park, attend college, or return home after dark.

India already has important women’s safety initiatives. The Safe City Project has operated in eight major cities and includes crime-hotspot identification, CCTV linked to command centres, women’s police patrols, Women Help Desks and support centres. India also has the nationwide 112 Emergency Response Support System, which can identify a caller’s location and dispatch emergency services.

The problem is that these capabilities are not yet a consistent, measurable women’s-safety system across every city and district. Safety also extends beyond streets: violence can occur in homes, workplaces, educational institutions, public transport and relationships.

Require every city and district to maintain a Women’s Safety Plan based on where, when, and how crimes and harassment against women occur.

The plan should include:

– Women’s safety audits and crime mapping to identify unsafe streets, parks, transit stops, markets and other hotspots.
– Safer public spaces through lighting, clear sightlines, maintained pathways and better urban design.
– Safer public transport, including stations, stops, vehicles and last-mile routes, with trained transport personnel and clear reporting procedures.
– Targeted police patrols based on crime patterns rather than uniform deployment everywhere.
– CCTV at justified high-risk locations, connected to actively monitored control centres, with clear privacy, access and retention safeguards.
– Rapid emergency response through 112, with response times measured and published.
– Simple and respectful reporting, supported by trained police and frontline personnel.
– Professional investigation, including timely forensic support and lawful tracking of repeat and high-risk offenders.
– Integrated victim support, connecting women to medical care, counselling, legal assistance and protection when needed.

India’s existing Safe City framework already incorporates several of these elements, including civic amenities, easier access to law enforcement and counsellors, hotspot surveillance, offender tracking and community awareness. The reform is to make this approach a permanent responsibility across India rather than a pilot concentrated in eight cities.

Each city should publish a small set of outcomes: emergency response times, identified hotspots corrected, investigation performance, repeat offences and periodic surveys of whether women actually feel safe using public spaces and transport.

The operating model should be:

Map risk → Conduct safety audits → Fix unsafe environments → Increase targeted policing → Make transport safer → Make reporting easy → Respond quickly → Investigate professionally → Support victims → Measure results

Quito, Ecuador provides a useful international example.

After research found high levels of violence and sexual harassment against women in public spaces—particularly public transport—Quito developed a citywide Safe City programme with UN Women. It used evidence from women themselves to shape policy, strengthened rules addressing sexual harassment, improved prevention and response services, and made safer public transportation a major priority.

The approach did not treat women’s safety as only a police problem. Transport authorities, urban planners, police, municipal government and women themselves were brought into the system. The programme developed reporting procedures for public transport, and drivers and operational staff helped create practical response protocols.

The programme was subsequently subjected to a participatory impact evaluation involving 737 people, 90% of them women. UN Women reported that evaluations found women’s experience of sexual harassment on Quito’s public transport had declined.

India already possesses many of the individual pieces. The opportunity is to connect them and scale them nationwide.

Women’s safety improves when policing, transportation, urban design, technology, emergency response and victim support operate as one system.

The ultimate measure should not be how many cameras were installed or how much money was spent.

It should be whether women can study, work, travel, exercise, and participate in public life without having to organize their lives around fear.