Your cities won’t be smart unless women feel safe to step out after 7pm by themselves.
While smart cities are becoming the rage across the country, true smartness and success of these will be realised only when a woman will feel comfortable enough to walk on the street past sunset without the fear of being attacked, teased, or assaulted.
In 2015, the Government of India launched the “Smart Cities Mission” in order to drive economic growth and improve the quality of life in cities across the country. It aims to do so by harnessing technology and encouraging local development to “create smart outcomes for citizens”. The Mission aimed to cover 100 cities by FY 2019–20.
While on paper this mission seems necessary, innovative, and a possible solution to a lot of problems faced by citizens of cities, the implementation of the same has been subpar. Only about 900 of the 5,100 projects proposed have been completed since 2015. A report found that there would be a shortfall of urban planners by 1.1 million by 2020 in the country. An aspirational project such as this requires the human capital to plan, design, fund, and implement.
Among the goals of improved access to water, electricity, sanitation, and transport, providing safety and security to citizens, especially women, children, and the elderly has also been mentioned. How much of this has been achieved? Well, if we know anything about India, it’s this — not only is it slowly becoming one of the most unsafe places for women, it is also being recognised as one internationally. A report published in 2019 found that 50% of the inhabitants in Delhi perceive their locality to be unsafe for women, children, and elderly people. These numbers are likely to be much higher for non-binary and trans people, given the rampant queer-phobia that exists among the Indian population. The onus of one’s safety in a public space is popularly ascribed to how one dresses, who they go out with, what they do and at what time. It’s as though victim-blaming is the cheapest alternative to holding wrongdoers accountable for their actions. Oh wait.
What’s worse is that we are still electing politicians who not only hold, but also propagate extremely regressive ideas of the role of women in society (yes, I am referring to the causal link being made between women wearing ripped jeans and the improper upbringing of children). If these are our representatives, then we can only imagine what their voters feel.
Until the recent past, domestic and workplace violence against women was recognized as a human rights issue. However, the tide is now also shifting towards harassment and other forms of violations against women and other gender-based minorities in public spaces. It is unfortunate that almost every single woman I know has felt unsafe while travelling in public transport, walking on a street, or utilising any other public amenity. There are very minimal provisions that exist in a public space that one can rely on to ensure safety, if any. Catcalling, stalking, unwarranted touching, staring, etc are so prevalent in public spaces that they have been normalised and are not even viewed as forms of harassment. Women have accepted it as part of their daily lives and have found ways to work around it. However, if this kind of behaviour is not punished, it can turn to a harsher form of violence very quickly. Part of the problem is the way public spaces have been designed around the world.
Historically, a public space is occupied by males, while females are confined to the private space (they’re not even safe there, but let’s not go there yet). The design of a public space, by default, ignores the needs of women and their safety mostly because the field of urban-planning is dominated by upper-class cisgendered men for whom an issue like this could be a blind spot. Amenities like proper street lighting, access to gender-sensitive security personnel or the police, and safe public transport, among others are necessary for women to not only feel safe, but also protect them from the anticipation of being hurt. While the Smart City Mission aims to provide amenities such as CCTV cameras (Chennai was ranked the most surveilled city in 2021), their effectiveness in protecting women from violence has been questionable. The use of such ‘smart technology’ also begs the question of who is doing the surveillance, and whether the solution to women’s safety is monitoring and controlling their movement even more.
In effect, while the Smart Cities Mission is an aspirational mission to modernize cities in the country, the fundamental right and need of safety has to be given a lot more weightage in the agenda. Urban spaces are getting more and more populated (it is estimated that by 2030, 61% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas), and women, trans, and non-binary individuals will make up a considerable proportion of that population. Several individuals and organisations are making strides in the field of making urban spaces more inclusive and accessible to girls, women, and other gender-based minorities, from conducting women’s safety audits to creating apps to crowdsource information about safe and unsafe areas. Across the world, women have also found art to be a strong medium of expressing their dissent towards public harassment. Campaigns such as “Stop Telling Women to Smile”, “Girls at Dhabas”, “Right to the City”, “Everyday Sexism Project”, and countless others have encouraged women to speak about their lived experiences of harassment in public spaces through photographs, portraits, and stories.
It is the need of the hour for us to make the safety of women a priority. Whether it be through the planning of smarter cities, or increased state capacity, or gender sensitisation, or education, or locking away certain perpetrators. The numbers speak for themselves (even though they are massively underreported), and we cannot sit back and do nothing. Let us take the night back, literally and figuratively.
