India:
Women Living Between A Rock And a Hard Place
By Manipadma Jena

India:
The Wilting Of The Garden City
By Roshin Varghese

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India
Planning Cities As If Women Matter
By Pamela Philipose

As in other parts of the world, India's urban population is registering an inexorable rise. Unfortunately, while planning and designing cities and public spaces in India, agencies have generally been blind to the needs of the people who live and work in them, especially women. For far too long, women have had to accommodate themselves to the dangers that confront them when they go out of their homes. They have had to restrict their lives: They hunch in a public bus or avoid walking on narrow pavement for fear of being groped. They are constantly thinking of safety implications of where they go and what they wear. So can Indian cities be planned in a manner that ensures greater security and mobility for its most vulnerable citizens?

* "In cities where you have shops rising from the footpath or pavement, you have a feeling of security, because you feel there is activity on the edge."

India
Excuse Me! Can I Just Live Freely In This City?
By Kalpana Viswanath

More than 90 per cent women feel that just being a woman is a vulnerability. Seven out of ten women have been routinely subject to staring, leering and verbal forms of harassment. A whopping 66 per cent women say that they have faced incidents of violence and harassment between two to five times in a year. Women's safety, or the lack of it, plays a central role in determining their mobility and access to a city. But, unfortunately, the girls and women in Delhi learn very early that it is a jungle out there. Delhi, seen through a gendered lens, is not a pretty picture going by the findings of the recent joint survey by the Delhi government, NGO Jagori and UNIFEM. But despite these dire circumstances, women are not taking this lying down.

* 'One of most interesting findings of this survey is that more than 60 per cent women confronted the harasser in some way. This was uniformly high among women from different age groups and in different occupations.'

India
Delhi Women Can Depend On Bus Conductors For A Safer Ride
By Tripti Nath

Almost a decade ago, a newspaper advertisement showing women being harassed at a bus stand in the presence of silent male bystanders, read, 'There are no men in this picture or this would not happen'. The text may have slightly sexist overtones but it flags the fact that Delhi has long had a reputation for being the most unsafe city in India for women. Women travelling by Delhi's public transport - mainly the buses - are forced to suffer sexual harassment in silence, as the people around them, mostly men, look the other way. But in an effort to make the average woman's daily commute a little more secure and harassment free, Delhi government's Department of Women and Child Development teamed up with Jagori, a Delhi-based women's organisation, to organise a three-day gender sensitisation training for 50 Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) trainers.

* 'These 50 instructors will pass on the knowledge through refresher courses and depot visits. It motivates drivers and conductors to be take quick and correct decisions in case they notice that a woman passenger is being harassed.'

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