The Jagori ‘Safetipin’ initiative was launched in July 2014 with the hope of transforming our cities into safer places, with special focus on urban slums of the southeast district of Delhi. As part of the process, women from Badarpur, a municipal ward in south-east were engaged with support from Jagori and Safetipin to conduct safety audits and conduct a pilot using the mobile application in the low-income community, The initiative focused on the examining how safe the areas in and around Badarpur are for women, by analyzing various aspects such as infrastructure, transportation, presence of police force, feeling of safety etc. For this, safety audits were conducted using the Safetipin mobile application. The routes audited for this initiative are:
1. Mathura Road, Mohan Cooperative Industrial Estate
2. Mathura Road, Molarband Extention
3. Kalindi Kunj, Mithapur Road
4. Jaitpur Road, Tajpur Pahadi
For the Safetipin initiative, the auditors pinned a total of 412 safety information points on the selected routes of which there are 299 safety audit pins, 70 hazards pins, 19 harassment pins, 21 places and 3 feeling pins. These pins were collected between 5-9pm during a period of 3 months.
Safety Audit
A Women’s Safety Audit (WSA) is a participatory tool for collecting and assessing information about perceptions of urban safety in public spaces. It is a powerful tool for change, which can bring together an entire community to work to improve their quality of life. WSAs help create a safer and more comfortable environment for women, and other vulnerable group of people – for everyone (METRAC, 1998). It is process which brings people together to walk through a physical environment, evaluate how safe it feels, and identify ways to make it safer (WISE 2005). This is based on the premise that users of space are expert in understanding how they experience and feel about it.
Findings and Analysis
The area surrounding Badarpur falls under South Delhi district, one of the affluent belts in the city. However, with poor lighting, lack of public and private security, lack of openness and low gender diversity in the area, the areas is perceived as unsafe, especially by women. The graph below (Graph1) indicates the average score of each safety audit parameter:
Findings from the safety audits show that all the audit parameters except for public transport are below average, with 4 parameters being particularly low–openness of the area, street lights, presence of public and/or private security and gender diversity in the area. All the other parameters such visibility, presence of people, walk path, availability of public transport and feeling of safety score higher in relation to others. However, they all score below average. Download Complete Safety Badarpur Report.