Due attention must be paid by authorities at the central, state and local levels across India to the National Annual Report and Index on Women’s Safety (NARI) 2025, released in Delhi this past week. Going beyond mere numbers of crimes registered in the National Crime Records Bureau, which are then inferred for safety or the lack of it, the National Commission for Women’s NARI report is a more comprehensive and composite metric of women’s safety in urban India, touching upon aspects such as education, work opportunities, the role of authorities, and freedom of movement.
The NARI 2025 edition, a survey of 12,770 women across 31 cities, reveals that the national safety score is barely 65 per cent, with four of every ten women feeling unsafe, harassment remaining under-reported, night-time safety and mobility persistent pain points, and low trust in authorities. Mumbai, Kohima, Visakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar, Aizawl, Gangtok and Itanagar emerged as the safest cities, while Patna, Jaipur, Faridabad, Delhi, Kolkata, Srinagar and Ranchi were rated the least safe. While there are surprises, such as Kolkata, which residents rate as a safe city, it would be myopic to confine the debate merely to ratings of cities.
This report underscores, again, what women’s groups have emphasised for years: safety in cities is not merely low crime rates or an absence of violence against women but an outcome of systemic and infrastructural factors, and that truly addressing it would need close attention to these too. Instead, women’s safety has been reduced to episodic outbursts after particularly heinous rapes. While outrage serves a fleeting purpose, it is attention to city-building and systemic issues that will make cities safer.
So many women feeling unsafe at night-time is the product of how cities are built with exclusionary or single-zoning approaches instead of mixed-use areas, which make for greater safety. Women’s low trust in authorities is a sign of how hopeless the situation is and calls for a systemic overhaul. Equally important is the finding that the number of women aged 18 to 24 years reporting harassment doubled from last year; 38 per cent cited their neighbourhoods as the hotspots, and 29 per cent listed public transport.
On the one hand, the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) is all set to induct its first-ever all-women commando team into core operations after an intense eight-week advanced commando course; these women will take on duties in Quick Reaction Teams (QRT) and Special Task Force (STF) duties at high-security establishments and plants. On the other hand, average Indian women in cities feel less than completely safe, including in their own neighbourhoods. Recognising the systemic gaps and taking steps to address them would go a long way in making urban India safer for women.
