New Delhi, Sep 30 (IANS) Women in Delhi can now find out on a website the areas that are not safe to travel alone, while women across the country can report about the harassment faced by them.
Whypoll, an NGO on citizen empowerment, Friday launched www.whypoll.org with a series of lectures titled ‘Safe in the city’.
‘Through a ground and online survey among one lakh women, we have mapped out the 100 most unsafe zones in the city and national capital region (NCR). The website will be an easy and effective way of knowing what the women in India’s capital go through,’ said Whypoll co-founder Shweta Punj.
‘The idea is that most of the times, a woman chooses not to report about the harassment to the police. So there is no fighting back,’ Punj said, adding that the website help tap the kind of harassment women go through and include that at the policy and advocacy level later.
Among the areas listed are Dhaula Kuan, the parking lot of the Priya complex and the outer circle of Connaught Place. Surprisingly, quite a lot of Metro stations – among them three in the Dwarka subcity in north Delhi – and 10 sectors in suburban Noida.
While many women felt the city has never been safe for women, irrespective of the section they belong to, women’s rights activist Ranjana Kumari said ‘the society is bred knowing the city is unsafe for women’.
‘From the onset itself, girls are told not to venture out late, or not wear certain type of clothes. So this attitude has become a part of our culture,’ she said at the lecture.
‘One rape, a bit of hue and cry, and everything is over. Who cares to know after that,’ Ranjani Kumari, director of the Centre for Social Research (CSR) asked.
