Three years ago, Shaliya was so shy she didn’t want to leave her house. Like many of the 64 million people living in India’s sprawling slums, her home in New Delhi’s Sanjay camp had no toilet, and she dreaded the lewd comments from men loitering on the street if she had to walk to the public toilets yards away.



Shaliya has worked hard in the last three years, setting herself up as a youth leader and trying to tackle the problem of women’s safety in her neighbourhood. She runs an online map that shows areas that aren’t safe or that have no lighting, and tries to educate parents about why girls and boys must study and play together, and respect each other. And she advises other shy young girls how to deal with intimidating comments or threats from men on the street, trying to make their own walk to the public toilet slightly more safe.

India’s national crime statistics make for grim reading. There were 82,422 recorded assaults against women in 2015, including sexual harassment, voyeurism and stalking and another 34,651 reported rapes. Many other assaults and rapes are believed to be unreported. The brutal rape and subsequent death of a young woman by five men in New Delhi in December 2012 shocked India and the world. In the aftermath of the attack one question arose: how could women stay safe in public spaces? And perhaps inevitably, many turned to technology to try and create a solution.

First came a wave of online maps, which women could access in public internet cafes. When affordable mobile phones became widespread, attention shifted to dedicated apps, most of which combined a reporting system for unsafe areas with and the ability to share location with friends or family, or a panic alarm feature for emergencies.

An app launched by the Delhi police called Himmat, or “courage” in Hindi, sends out the user’s location to the police control room. It is just one of 40 different safety apps currently available for women in India. Yet many of them went the same way as Hawk Eye, an app launched and promoted by police in Hyderabad in 2013. It had good intentions but simply didn’t do the job; not a single genuine alarm was raised through the app, which has come to represent the futility of tackling a complex social and cultural problem with crude technology.

This wave of apps is referred to by some as “saviour” apps. Osama Manzar, creator of the Digital Empowerment Foundation, says that in the hurry to try and rush out a service to help, not much strategic consideration was given to how connect services to the government. “For some others it is just a feel-good project and only a few are serious about real solutions,” he says.

The campaign group Red Elephant was set up to coordinate safety efforts and provide emotional and legal support to women who have experienced violent on the streets or at home. Its research in early 2016 found that of 4,300 women, 2,547 had a safety app installed on their mobile phone, yet 72% said they had not used it at all. Separate research by the women’s safety charity Akshara found that 95% of women in India have faced sexual harassment on the streets.

Many of these issues were highlighted in the 2011 book Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets, which explored women’s right to use public spaces in safety. It led to an empowerment campaign by women who “loitered” in public spaces in Mumbai, Jaipur and Aligarh. Co-author Sameera Khan says she is concerned about an over-reliance on technology to help women feel safe, not least because it means private companies are gathering personal data on their location.

“The plethora of tech-based solutions seem to assume that women don’t do anything for their safety, when in reality, without any assured state or institutional support, women and girls are always strategising and producing safety for themselves in a multitude of ways,” said Khan.

Akshara’s co-director Dr Nandita Gandhi says there are both technological and social challenges in tackling this epidemic of violence and aggression against women. Many app projects simply don’t have enough funding for the staff or resources needed to keep the service updated, yet developers have to create apps that work across a huge number of different handsets, and many cheap handsets have poor battery life, slow processors and outdated operating systems. There’s also poor connectivity in many regions and inaccurate GPS – all of which make safety apps harder to use and less reliable. And while the Indian government has ruled that all mobile phones sold from 2017 must have a built-in panic button, this will also lead to an increase in the price of handsets.

Other problems are more profound, including lack of education among some police forces that collaborate on safety apps. Akshara’s HarassMap project crowdsourced women’s experiences from across Mumbai. “When we collaborated with the police, they asked us to verify every complaint that we received – that’s simply not possible because majority of the complaints are reported anonymously,” said Gandhi, whose work has focused on improving the relationship between the community and the police, many of whom are often coloured by their own moral judgments about how women should behave and whether they should be out after dark. “The tendency has been to ignore stalking and lewd remarks. Women feel that their complaints won’t be taken seriously by the police, and just want to move on.”

Another project, SafeCity, has concentrated on backing up its technology with workshops and education in the real world. Launched in December 2012 by ElsaMarie D’Silva, who left a career in the aviation industry to focus on social justice projects. It focuses on crowdsourced reports of assaults and harassment and has gathered 10,000 stories from more than 50 cities across India, Nepal and Kenya.

D’Silva says most of the stories on the site have been the result of working with grassroots communities in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Goa, organising workshops for women and girls and encouraging them to discuss their safety in public spaces. “Women say they would rather change their walking route than complain to the police. In the bargain, the perpetrator becomes bolder,” she said. “Often in our workshops, when women start opening up, men say they didn’t know the extent of such incidences, because the women would keep mum than talk about it.” She says that bystanders also need to speak up when men act inappropriately or they become complicit in violence against women.

D’Silva hopes that women will be able to feel more confident in reporting crimes, and that safety can slowly be improved in problematic parts of the city. For now, the rivalry of competing safety apps isn’t helping, says Red Elephant founder Kirthi Jayakumar, who survived child sexual abuse herself.

“The idealist in me wants to believe that so many apps means so many people want to address the issue of gender-based violence,” she said. “But organisations are very guarded about their curriculum and data, instead of this information being in the public domain.”

For Shaliya, helping her local community is the most direct way to start making a difference. Coordinating a group of 20 young people in her New Delhi slum, Shaliya’s team have painted murals using Hindi words directed at men: a boy whistling at a girl, a crouching girl being touched by three men and three boys pulling at a girl’s scarf.

It seems to have helped, she says. “After about a month of those paintings, girls began to openly complain about certain boys, cops began to tour the place, and now there are hardly any boys loitering outside the toilet complex.”