Who is adventurous?
AKHILA SIVADAS
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Rather than calling working women adventurous, the authorities should be making Delhi more women-friendly.
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We cannot measure the city’s image by the number of flyovers it has or the glitter of its malls …but by how safe people feel to move about in it.
Photo: Sushil Kumar Verma
Not adventurous, just doing her job: Paying homage to Soumya.
It looks like we are all still trying to come to terms with what happened to Soumya Vishwanathan. Here was a young, middle-class aspiring professional who put her commitment to work ahead of her personal fears, anxiety and demands. On that fateful night of September 30, she had stayed back in office to ensure latest coverage of the blasts at Malegoan and Modesa. And what followed confirmed the worst fears we have about the city and its denizens.
On the surface, Delhi looks a safe city, a modern city where you see young women driving alone at midnight and travelling in buses and walking along lonely stretches of road, something you don’t see in many other cities. All this despite the fact that this city is known for its “macho” male and the overt political clout of the culprits. Try asking any professional woman about her experiences and she would invariably complain of the unruliness of the people of the capital and how unsafe it is for them to move about. So much so, the editor of a women’s magazine wrote, a bit dramatically, that she felt much safer in New York than in Delhi where she always carried a can of pepper spray.
The lawlessness or, more precisely, incidences of “stalking” women goes back as far as the Chopra children’s murder, in 1978, which then caught the headlines in a manner never seen before and compelled the wheels of justice to get in motion to apprehend the culprits. But no serious effort has been made to understand and address the root cause of the problem.
Safety not a concern
In 2005-06 when Jagori, a leading women’s organisation, decided to explore the issue and conducted a safety audit of various parts of the city, they found city structures unsafe for women in different parts of Delhi. The audit scrutinised both the infrastructure such as street lighting, pavements, how well trees are trimmed, whether there are dark corners, the location of police booths, public telephones, or the presence of shops and other vendors and also the general attitude of the public towards violence against women or any vulnerable group. Leading planners like Mr. K.T, Ravindran, had then agreed that the drive to make roads automobile-friendly was partly responsible for the rise in crimes against women. A high-speed city, he pointed out, facilitated car-bound crime. Jagori partnered with the city government to address some of the fundamental concerns. The question is whether all this public debate and the concerted efforts helped to sensitize them on the issue and enhanced the political and administrative will to take a more 360-degree approach. On the contrary, we find them as defensive and piecemeal as they were 30 years ago.
The government has not addressed the real problems. Recently a newspaper reported about the lack of safety for women even in such a high security area like Parliament Street at 8 p.m. There were no policemen in the entire area. Now, with the streets being rid of hawkers and kiosks being shut or removed, walking along these lonely stretches has become a nightmare not just for women but also for men.
Changing profile
This issue assumes even greater urgency now with the nature of the workforce also changing, with more people working at night. This has become a city that never sleeps. And women are also perforce compelled to do the night stints. So the sight of them driving alone at night is not unusual sight at all. These are compulsions of their vocation, though there might be the odd adventure-seeker. Earlier, only very few vocations had people working round the clock, but now with call centres and the round-the-clock news channels, all these have changed and women are doing late night shifts.
In other words, we cannot measure the city’s image by the number of flyovers it has or the glitter of its malls or the swanky cars on its roads but by how safe people feel to move about in it. We are far from having achieved the minimum standards of safety for women not just at night but also during the day. It is time that the Chief Minister and others who are at the helm address these basic questions rather than rush to the media with hasty remarks.
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