DELHI

Dikshit needs to make Delhi safer for women
Apart from stemming crimes against women, the Chief Minister will have to tackle the traffic chaos
Kumar Rakesh

Delhi has had yet another makeover. Numerous flyovers have been built. The Metro network, which is still expanding, in addition to the low-floor buses, has improved and moderinsed the city’s mass transport system to a great extent. On the flip side, it has more vehicles, especially private cars and SUVs, than its roads can cope with, causing frequent jams across the city every day.

Besides, the Indian Capital is probably the most unsafe city for women, and as the increasing number of women join its growing workforce, the national Capital increasingly is a witness to cases of sexual assault on them.

The other significant issue facing the Capital is the multiplicity of authorities in its governance, a problem acknowledged often by Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit. Accountability is often missing, with one body blaming the other for the mess, as we saw during the Commonwealth Games.

When the lives of 71 people, most of them poor migrants, were snuffed out after a five-storey building, raised in blatant violation of civic laws, came down crashing in Lalita Park, everyone expected that the guilty officials would be swiftly punished. What followed was a shameful abdication of duty by the BJP-ruled Municipal Corporation of Delhi and the Congress-ruled government. Dikshit said it was the MCD’s duty to check violations of laws by the builder, while the BJP claimed it was presence of water in its basement which weakened the structure and brought it down. Clearing the water from the basement was the government’s job, it claimed.

Dikshit has been asking for more powers to be vested with the elected government but the Central Government has been reluctant. A more hands-on intervention by the Central Government and a little more sympathy to the needs of the Capital’s population are being sorely missed.

The gang-rape of a Mizo woman, a call centre employee, on November 26 last year after she was abducted by five persons was the latest reminder of Delhi’s failure in protecting its women. While this case received nationwide publicity, violence against women occurs in the city with alarming frequency.

The country’s first woman IPS officer Kiran Bedi, who has served in Delhi Police, says that cases of crimes against women are a proof of the absence of "preventive policing" as heinous crimes like gangrape are often committed by repeat offenders. Strict guidelines were issued to private companies to ensure the safety of their woman employees, and Delhi Police also took some measures.

A report by the Centre for Science and Environment stated in 2008 that 1,000 new cars join Delhi roads every day. The rapid development of satellite towns like Noida and Gurgaon means that tens of thousands of people drive in their cars to Delhi every day, clogging its roads. The increase of taxes on the purchase of new cars has not been a deterrent for the middle classes, let alone the rich.

The number of cars in Delhi is more than their total numbers in Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata put together, and there is unanimity that no amount of infrastructure development could keep pace with the rapid increase in vehicular population.

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