78% Indian women feel authorities aren’t doing enough to ensure their safety: Survey

Women spend a lot of mental and physical energy trying to avoid sexual assault, or to remain “safe”. In another reinforcement of this fact, a survey conducted by Neta App, a technology platform that promotes civic engagement, found that out of the 1 lakh Indian women who participated in the poll from 22 states across India, 42%  feel unsafe in their environments. An overwhelming 78% of them also felt that the authorities are not doing enough to ensure their safety.

While the data on how many respondents each city/state had is not out yet, Haryana (83%), Arunachal Pradesh (68%) and Chhattisgarh (62%) topped the list when it came to women feeling unsafe. It was found that the participating women felt safest in Himachal Pradesh (91%), Tripura (82%), Kerala (78%) and Andhra Pradesh (75%). In Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, 32%, 26% and 31% respectively of those surveyed reported feeling unsafe or very unsafe.

A whopping 92% women in Haryana polled their dissatisfaction with the authorities’ efforts to ensure safety, followed by Telangana (88%), and Bihar and Rajasthan (both at 86%). Surprisingly, though a majority of women who participated in the poll from Kerala said they felt safe in their surroundings, 86% also said that the efforts towards women’s safety were not enough.

An alarming 43,000 women reported that they had faced incidents where their security was compromised. “75% women from Madhya Pradesh, 74% from Rajasthan, 66% from Jharkhand, 65% each from Haryana and Delhi, have faced one or more incidents where their security was under threat. On the contrary, 87% women in Tamil Nadu (62% in Chennai), 84% in Kerala, 83% in Chhattisgarh, 82% in Assam and 80% in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand have never faced such an incident in their lives,” the survey found.

In Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka each, half the women surveyed reported having been in a situation where their safety was compromised.

Four metros – Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai – were also surveyed. Of these, Chennai had the most number of respondents saying that they felt safe in their surroundings (90%), followed by Mumbai (73%). In Kolkata and Delhi, 32% and 56% respectively reported feeling unsafe or very unsafe. However, 84% and 83% women in the respective cities also said that authorities were not working towards women’s safety adequately.

Neta App, a platform founded in 2018 by Pratham Mittal, aims to foster political accountability by allowing citizens to vote for their leaders, and then change their vote when their preference changes. It is modeled on Approval Ratings in the US, and hopes to make the platform reflective of the country’s political climate at a given point in time.

Voters have the facility to input their preferences constituency-wise, at the state, and at the central level. The company says that the platform also acts as a feedback mechanism for leaders. Neta App also enables people to share their opinion and conduct polls on matters of national and local importance.