Urban planning and infrastructure should incorporate women’s safety at the development stage itself, rather than treat it as an afterthought. According to experts at a national consultation in New Delhi on ‘safe and inclusive public spaces’, putting women’s safety at the forefront has a key impact on how women participate in a city’s economic and social activities.
“It is not about a place with fewer incidents of violence but a city where women have real agency in planning their daily lives,” said Stefan Priesner, United Nations (UN) Resident Coordinator in India, at the consultation organised by UN Women India. Researchers, activists, government officials and urban planners came together to discuss how women’s safety goes beyond counting cases of violence and building spaces that help women move freely and participate in economic activities.
According to Rajib Kumar Sen, senior advisor and programme director at NITI Aayog, safety is also defined by how women participate in economic activities. “In India’s women-led development, there is an opportunity to make city planning more inclusive, to build a virtuous cycle enabling women’s meaningful access to cities,” he added.
The session explored the need for collecting state-specific data, building safer tourism cities, gender sensitisation of people involved in public spaces, widening the definition of public areas, focusing on safety during last-mile connectivity, and adopting a gender-focused approach in both state and central budgets.
The discussion took place as the UN Women’s Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces initiative completed 15 years. New Delhi was one of the five founding cities of the initiative, alongside Cairo, Kigali, Port Moresby, and Quito.
People involved in shaping Delhi’s Safe City programme observed how the conversation has now shifted towards women being equal participants. “The cities had long been designed as if women were not their users. There’s a shift from protecting women to everyone’s equal right to the city,” said Suneeta Kar Dhar, gender advisor and board member of women’s rights organisation Jagori.
Suman Nalwa, former deputy commissioner of police in Delhi and currently serving as deputy inspector general in Arunachal Police, recalled how all departments came together after the Delhi Nirbhaya incident in 2012. “We used to get everyday reports about non-working streetlights, and those were fixed by night. That sort of empathy and promptness is required from the institutions without being given an external push,” she said.
Budget constraints and the underutilisation of allocated funds were other issues highlighted by the panellists. According to a written reply in the Rajya Sabha in July, several projects cleared under the Nirbhaya Fund are yet to spend a single rupee. The data further revealed that about 16 per cent of the ~7,990.85 crore set aside for the women’s safety corpus since 2013-14 remains unutilised.
Participants also noticed that harassment now crosses between online and offline spaces through image-based abuse, deepfakes, and coordinated attacks on women. They said making digital public spaces safe must be part of the same agenda.
The UN Women initiative now spans 75 cities in 36 countries.
