Natural surveillance, gender-friendly streets – how DDA plans to make Delhi safer for women

With the draft 2041 Delhi masterplan expected to be notified by April, researchers and academics have expressed concerns over the language of the draft, lack of extensive mapping.

Representational image . | Photo: Commons

New Delhi: Working women hostels, designated space for vendors with separate toilets for men and women, changing rooms and childcare facilities, and “natural surveillance” — these are among some of the provisions the Delhi Development Authority 2041 masterplan draft lists in order to make the capital safer for women and “facilitate more women to join the workforce”.  

With Delhi having earned a notorious reputation of being unsafe for women, the planning authority aims to ensure women’s safety and enhance economic opportunities in public spaces with its latest 20-year masterplan for the city.

Notably, Delhi recorded the highest rate of crimes against women among all Union territories and came next only second to Rajasthan’s Jaipur overall, according to  the latest NCRB report (2021). 

DDA’s 2041 masterplan draft, made public in June 2021, is expected to be notified/published by April this year.

The female labour participation rate in the city is 14.3% — five times lower than the male workforce — despite the increase in the share of the population of women in the working age in the last decade. The authority believes that financially independent women becoming a norm in Delhi may help improve the sex ratio, albeit indirectly.  

“The objective of the masterplan is to protect more women. Have more working women. You have to make provisions for them then only further expansion can be done. If we don’t make a provision or statement then no one will think about it,” Leenu Sahgal, Commissioner (Planning), DDA, told ThePrint.

However, a number of citizens’ groups, researchers, academics and Residents’ Welfare Associations have objected to the “ambiguous language” and “lack of extensive mapping of areas” .

But Sahgal assured that these benefits for working women included in the draft will be in the final document as well. She further said that the masterplan only laid down the policy provisions, where detailing would be done later by other departments like Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board etc.

“If you look at provisions that we have made for women in the masterplan, they mostly pertain to infrastructure. The plan permits hostels for working women in a mixed-use or residential areas and extra Floor Area Ratio (FAR) for building it, which the city or whoever is the service provider can provide,” one of the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) researchers, who worked on the social infrastructure aspect of the DDA masterplan draft, told ThePrint. 

Earlier the FAR for hostels was 1.2, now it has been increased to 1.5, which in simple terms means extra floor will be allowed. There is also emphasis put on providing hostels in proximity to employment centres. It has also been said that it is important to address the housing needs of both single working women and men and students, migrants.

The plan: ‘Natural surveillance’, multifacility plots  

There is a provision for “natural surveillance” or “eyes on the street” in the draft plan that involves removing setbacks (the minimum open space required around any building), boundary walls around commercial establishments or putting transparent edges in all new constructions in the city to facilitate visual surveillance of streets (allow people from inside to look out) to discourage harassment of women in public spaces. 

Other aspects of this feature involve making places like libraries, bookstores, retail, post offices, etc be mandatorily placed on lower floors with easy access from the street and vending spaces should be marked adjacent to the walking path, especially along high pedestrian volume areas to make the streets ‘active’/busy and thus, safer. 

“If commercial areas are nearer to roads. The shops will have customers coming in. There will be their own CCTV cameras. A woman walking there would feel more protected with 10 shops and 50 people around her which would discourage attempts at harassment. These provisions will definitely affect the working women positively,” Delhi-based urban planner Ayushi Agarwal, who has previously worked with NITI Aayog and DMRC. 

According to NIUA planners, earlier daycare and old-age homes were not allowed to be opened in commercial centres and private institutions for children and elderly to spend time while women and men worked. This was done by integrating the central government’s Maternal Benefits (Amendment) Act implemented by the Delhi government, which mandates every establishment having fifty or more employees to have the facility of crèche within a prescribed distance.

Additionally, the concept of multifacility plots at a local level has been introduced for the first time in the masterplan. 

“Instead of 1.5, a FAR of 2 will be given if two facilities are integrated on one plot with a ratio of 75% and 25%. So, if one structure is built in one domain like health (dispensary), the other will have to be of a different domain like anganwadis or community workspaces for skill development to training local women sewing among other things so they can earn a livelihood,” the NIUA planners said. 

‘Governance, not just infrastructure’ 

Meanwhile, after the draft plan was released, a number of citizens’ groups, researchers, academics and RWA associations that had come together for a campaign aiming to make the process of planning more representative and accessible to all by enabling wide-ranging public discussions on what kind of city and plan the people of Delhi want.

Saleha Sapra, urban geographer, practitioner and researcher, who has been a part of the campaign told ThePrint that they had been campaigning since much before the masterplan draft was put in the public domain. They had several meetings with DDA officials and NIUA researchers after the draft came out, where they expressed that the language of the plan was too ambiguous, didn’t give ‘gender’ adequate space and that mapping needed to be more decentralised. 

“What is a plan? it gives people a direction to move forward to implement things, right? But if its language is fluid, it kind of fails, because people in governance who are actually interested in doing things on the ground know, what they mean by these sporadic terms like child-friendly facilities or public space inventories. it’s just an umbrella term without any actual point,” she said.

Urban planner Ayushi Agarwal agreed with the criticisms against the masterplan draft regarding the lack of extensive mapping or outlining of areas, with regard to where the crime is more, or what facilities were needed in which places.

“Women’s safety is a big issue in Delhi. There has been no detailed research on where these hostels mentioned should be constructed. They could have identified, if not on plot-level, but just the information that it is needed in North Delhi or close to Delhi University could have been mentioned. Features like bylaws on how many nursing centres should be there in a building could have been added,” she said. 

She further argued that masterplan ideally talks about the governance aspect also and not just infrastructure, therefore, the absence of reference to vocational training centres for women or peer-to-peer counselling (where some women encourage others to participate in the economy) while talking about the need for making more women entering the workforce was unusual. 

The NIUA planners, on the other hand, contend that the plan was more enabling that way because it might not have direct references but by introducing these concepts or describing the ‘type of activity’, it allowed for more flexibility. For instance “breast-feeding zones” suggested by the campaigners could come under “child-care facilities” and anyone who wished to build it could not be denied permission.  

“The masterplan cannot write a lot of things that are not policy-level decisions. Whatever they are asking is already in the plan. It talks about what can be done…,” the researchers argued. 

What DDA says

Sahgal asserted that they were not the implementing agency and that’s why they couldn’t do any detailing, which is done by specific agencies according to their needs and requirements based on the policy framework provided by them.

“We have annual meetings headed by Delhi’s Lieutenant Governor (LG). This is done to ensure everyone is working on what they are supposed to do. When LG says that something has to be done or data has to be collected then it is done more efficiently because of the position of authority he holds. He makes a part of his (written/official) statements. That is the monitoring avenue to ensure provisions from the plan are implemented,” she said. 

She also added that they are trying whatever best they could do.

The masterplan also mentions that the DDA and other government agencies will ensure that there will be continuous engagement with different citizen groups such as women, youth etc., and stakeholders to understand and assess the impacts of plan implementation on the ground.

However, Sapra isn’t convinced. “The entire participatory process is digital. And once you do that you’re already excluding a bunch of people from it, because how many have access to Zoom,” she asked. 

(Edited by Anumeha Saxena)