A new mobile app is allowing women to identify safe zones in a city with the help of crowd-sourced audits
Photograph: Juha Uitto/Creative Commons
What makes public spaces safer for women? Undoubtedly, increased budgetary spending on safety measures is critical. However, the recent 2015 Union Budget, which has doubled its outlay on women's safety issues without having come up with adequate schemes to utilise the funds, begs the question: are expensive schemes the only way to make our public spaces women-friendly? Safetipin, a free smartphone app, demonstrates that it takes relatively cheap technology and a great deal of ingenuity to take the issue of women's safety to the one place they can best control -- their own hands.
Started in 2013 by techie Ashish Basu and Kalpana Vishwanath, prominent women's rights activist and ex-head of Jagori, Safetipin is an app that uses a mix of crowd sourcing and in-house safety audits to allow users to plot their locations on a map and see its safety score. While the green pins on the map indicate places that are well populated, brightly lit and close to public transport, red pins flag unsafe zones. "Users can check the app on their phones to make safer choices. It also allows them to choose to be tracked by a trusted relative or friend, when they feel the need to," says Vishwanath. Once logged in, users can conduct their own "safety audits" that are based on specific quantitative parameters like street lights, number of women in the public space, how visible one is to others and the distance to public transport. "The safety audit also includes a qualitative parameter, with regards to how safe the user actually feels," says Vishwanath.
Safetipin's 6,000-odd audits so far (mostly in Delhi NCR but in pilot stages in nine Indian and three world cities) have yielded interesting data inputs for urban planners and the government. "We have found that, by and large, women's perceptions of safety are based on some criteria -- the level of lighting in the area (well-lit places "feel" safer), the gender diversity in the area (places with women around are perceived as less threatening) and the degree of visibility (places where the woman is in plain sight of others are generally considered better than secluded spots).
"When we audited six Delhi Transport Corporation bus terminals on these parameters, we suggested that more seating inside the terminal would encourage more people, especially women, elderly and children to wait there. Public toilets and street vendors inside the terminals would also ensure steady traffic, making them safer places on the whole," says Vishwanath. "Over time, the data we collect could be useful to NGOs for advocacy for safer spaces, as well as to the government for designing them better," she says.
The idea of Safetipin, downloaded thus far by over 35,000 users mostly between 25 and 40 years of age, grew out of Vishwanath's experiences with Jagori and the Safe Delhi programme. "For years, we'd been looking at institutional solutions to make cities more inclusive. But eventually, I realised we needed a more hands-on approach to this issue," she says. While there are several other safety apps in the market, most of them are predominantly for emergencies, with all the premier features available only in the paid versions. "The USP of Safetipin is that it enables women to plan their travel, choose safer places. And it is completely free," says Vishwanath. The app, available for free download for Android as well as iOS users, is, of course, limited to some extent by the fact that only smartphone owners can access it. "We're trying to bridge the gap by offering the safety map on our website," says Vishwanath. "We have also conducted several offline safety chaupals in low-income areas."
The app, and the data it will collect as its usage grows, could have far-reaching ramifications. "We are, for example, talking to property developers to include our safety scores with their listings," says Vishwanath. They are also working to add new features to the app, like finding the safest route to one's destination. In the years ahead, Vishwanath plans to expand Safetipin to cities across India using local NGO partners to conduct safety audits. "Eventually, we'd like to see a day when all you'll need to navigate a strange city or place safely, is your Safetipin app," she says.
Late in the evening after meeting Vishwanath, I find myself conducting a mental safety audit outside the parking lot of Ambience Mall in Vasant Kunj. Visibility? Negative. Street lights? Present but not working. Gender diversity? Not at all. Indeed, I reflect, crowd-sourced data on public spaces has the potential of being the next best thing for urban design and safety. It also has the potential to change the widely held mindset that there's little that we can do to ensure our own safety in public areas. Being a Safetipin user could be the first step.
