Digital News Guru Madhya Pradesh Desk:
Indore Ranks High on Women’s Safety Index
India’s urban landscape often grapples with a dichotomy of progress and peril, particularly concerning women’s safety. The National Annual Report & Index on Women’s Safety (NARI 2025), released by the National Commission for Women (NCW), offers a grounded look into how women perceive their safety in Indian cities. Among the 31 cities surveyed, Indore emerges as a standout, with nearly 70 % of women rating it safe, exceeding the national average of 64.6 %.
NARI 2025 Indore’s Safety Perception: Day vs. Night
While Indore’s ranking is commendable, the findings also highlight a stark urban challenge—time matters when it comes to safety:
- Daytime confidence: A reassuring 83 % of women reported feeling safe or highly safe during daylight in Indore.
- Nighttime concerns: After dark, that level of comfort falls sharply to only 48 %, while 22 % explicitly felt unsafe or highly unsafe.
These numbers reflect a nationwide trend of nocturnal vulnerability—women may feel at ease in familiar environments, but darkness often brings anxiety.
Calls for Action: What Women Want
The NARI report reflects aspirations for tangible improvements:
- 61 % of respondents want more visible police presence.
- 24 % demand stronger follow-up on safety complaints.
These figures underscore that while Indore fares better than most, there’s significant room for improvement—especially in areas like public lighting, policing visibility, and responsive grievance redressal.
A Broader Context: How Cities Stack Up
Indore’s results are promising, but they exist within a broader narrative of urban safety disparities captured by NARI 2025:
- National perspective:
- Overall, 6 in 10 women feel safe in their cities.
- But 4 in 10 women—a sizeable minority—feel unsafe or not very safe.
- Harassment prevalence stands at 7 % overall, and surges to 14 % among women under 24.
- Most incidents go unreported: only one in three women report harassment—meaning two-thirds remain unacknowledged in official data.
- Trust in authority isn’t high: only 25 % of women are confident of effective redressal.
- Safest cities:
Kohima, Visakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar, Aizawl, Gangtok, Itanagar, and Mumbai top the list—credited to superior infrastructure, visible policing, civic participation, and gender equity.
- Least safe cities:
Patna, Jaipur, Faridabad, Delhi, Kolkata, Srinagar, and Ranchi rank at the bottom, burdened by weak governance, patriarchal norms, and poor urban planning. - Specific comparisons:
- Chennai, for instance, scored 61.7 %, ranking 21st. While 75 % felt safe during the day, only 54 % felt the same at night, with 21 % feeling unsafe after dark.
- Jaipur fares worse at 59.1 %, with 8 % of women facing harassment, primarily verbal. Trust in infrastructure and authorities is low, and only 9 % seen significant improvement in two years.
Against this backdrop, Indore’s 70 % score is a relative success, despite the persistent vulnerabilities after dark.
Strategies to Build Safer Cities
Indore’s performance—better, but not perfect—points toward a set of actionable reforms:
- Strengthen Night-Time Infrastructure
- Enhance street lighting, emergency help booths, and safe transport.
- Bolster community vigilance, particularly in poorly lit localities.
- Institutional Trust & Policing
- Deploy foot and mobile police patrols in critical areas.
- Ensure timely and transparent response to complaints—not just visibility, but competence.
- Encourage Reporting & Support Systems
- Simplify harassment reporting channels—online platforms, women helplines, app-based alert systems.
- Run awareness campaigns to reduce stigma and inform about rights and resources.
- Foster Holistic Civic Engagement
- Support neighborhood watch programs.
- Integrate gender-sensitive design into sidewalks, public planning, and transit hubs—as seen in top-ranking cities.
- Prioritize Urban Planning with Gender Lens
- Use safety audits to identify and upgrade risk zones.
- Promote mixed-use city centers that are active and lit after sunset, increasing natural surveillance.
Conclusion
Indore’s high ranking in NARI 2025—where 70 % of women deem it safe—is undoubtedly a bright spot in India’s women’s safety landscape. Yet the steep drop in safety perception after darkness reveals a persistent urban paradox. Real safety cannot exist—as NCW Chairperson Vijaya Rahatkar emphasizes—merely on paper or through policing. It must extend to infrastructure, institutional reliability, and societal attitudes that allow women to move freely and fearlessly—by day or by night. Indore’s example shows promise, but also the unfulfilled promise of safety after dark—a gap calling for both civic resolve and policy determination.
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