Is the Nirbhaya Fund a solution or problem?

Writer: Nihira
Editors: Kavya, Amshuman
Artwork featured: B Prabha

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Introduction

On August 2nd, 2024 Union Minister of Women and Child Development, Annapurna Yadav, provided details to the Lok Sabha on the status of the Nirbhaya Fund. Set up in 2013 by the then Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, the demand-driven Fund was a response to the rape and murder of a woman in Delhi. The demand-driven Fund was established to “improve the safety and security of women”. Since then, the 1000 crore rupees annual corpus has been heaped with problems of under-utilisation, chronic decline in the budget, and also poor implementation evidenced by the miserable conditions of ‘one-stop centres’ supposedly meant for victims and survivors of sexual violence. Though, what is more critical and less discussed is how the Nirbhaya Fund takes a fundamentally flawed approach to the reality of sexual violence, especially when it comes to its patriarchal understanding of ‘women’s safety’. Care is, by design, absent from the fund’s purview - reflecting a larger social and political construction of sexual violence as an exceptional danger rather than a daily reality.

A look at what the Fund supports - and, more importantly, does not support - provides a window into how the capitalist state pushes the wrong ‘solutions’. It exposes society’s inability to deal with the sheer brutality that defines the broader experience of living under the threat of sexual violence. Massive chunks concern apparatuses of technology-led surveillance mechanisms, and carceral undertakings that bolster policing infrastructure with little transparency or sense.

Tech-enabled surveillance: A publicly funded privately led response to sexual violence

‘Women’s safety’ is a term flung around frequently. The loaded term is itself seen as a strategy, and one that justifies any response. Even if that means throwing money at a prominent tech bubble dream: mass and intensive surveillance. The surveillance is framed as necessary to ensure ‘women’s safety’. But what has this meant?

Increased surveillance through installation of  CCTV is a popular demand from various government corners including the Ministry of Railways. Karnataka sought 650 crore to enable CCTV infrastructure in Bengaluru. The Punjab government was granted 154 crores for urban surveillance grids. 17.6 crore rupees were pumped into installing video surveillance along the Konkan Railways. The Manipur state government was granted 80 lakhs for the same in women’s market areas. Cameras failed to protect Kuki-zo women who experienced majoritarian sexual violence. In fact, the Meitei men who committed the atrocity circulated viral videos of the atrocity. What benefit have CCTVs brought for women? Reliving our trauma?

Telangana’s request for more than 200 crores for ‘tracking tools’ such as ‘state-wise Vehicle Tracking Platform’ and Telangana’s ‘Vehicle Tracking and SOS button’ shows the other part of surveillance. One of the biggest recipients of the Fund was the ‘Safe City’ proposal with over Rs 1,500 crore. The release of this immense block of money has seemingly filled the pockets of tech companies but done little to make any city any safer for girls and women. Feminists have been vocal in their opposition to such moves. ‘Smart city’ initiatives delivered by tech infrastructure entities sound smart to investors, rosy-eyed bureaucrats, and people impressed by flashy band-aids. Those committed to the long-term dismantling of gendered violence, however, would recognise that transferring huge sums of public money to the balance sheets of private interests is disturbing if not entirely useless.

The language of ‘tech-enabled solutions’ (especially surveillance equipment) is detached from women’s reality. Many ‘solutions’ under the Fund assume the likely ‘perpetrator’ to be a stranger on the road when we know that is not the likeliest of scenarios. Of course, Indian boys and men are taught to violate girls and women. So they do. But why the disproportionate focus on the streets, and not the home? The stranger, and not the family? The random man and not the factory manager? The Hindu cult leader? Perhaps because when it comes to women, surveillance is not new. Where once it was parents and neighbours and everyone around you, it is now everyone with access to the right technology and database.

One uncomfortable question side-stepped here is also what comes of the footage. When something is recorded on cameras, who has access to the material and how are they held accountable? Indians have already shown how little care they have towards women being raped in broad day-light on the road; with the footage of a recent incident being recorded by passersby to the horror and then shared on pornographic sites. The same people then shout for the death penalty, as if atoning for their sins by overcompensating for their guilt.

The Fund granted over 5 crores to the Ministry of Railways for the procurement of “2109 tabs”. For what? The list leaves that aside. One assumes it is to fulfil ‘safety’. Anything goes as long as we keep slapping those words on policies with several consequences but no accountability. We have to question whether 300+ crores for an ‘Emergency Response System’ from a fund set up for ‘women’s security’ translated to the ‘safety’ of those killed in the recent stampede on the New Delhi Railway Station. Did the “2109 tabs” send alerts directly to ministers that women are unsafe due to unclear announcements and the lack of public investment in physical ground staff who could answer questions and direct passengers to the right platform?

This question of who the state and media want us to believe is a ‘perpetrator’ is present in many projects. Andhra Pradesh’s request to finance ‘Abhayam’, an SOS app for women and children, is being executed by a company named Vedavaag Systems Ltd. It was first installed in auto rickshaws plying in Visakhapatnam. A big red button spelling out ‘EMERGENCY’ available for passengers to punch. One wonders whether personally driven Thars and SUVs should come manufactured with the same.

Evidence suggests serious sexual violence is more likely to be mete out by known people, people who we share intimate space and/or some connections with. Yet, it is always the unknown (often marginalised) stranger that is vilified, and always women’s freedoms that are first put to the test.

The police state: Securitizing the response to sexual violence

The cameras, the buttons, the switches, like the next piece of machinery, all feed into one of the biggest beneficiaries of the fund: the Indian police.

The 112 dial-in emergency response system received a whopping 364 crores from the Fund according to Annapurna Devi’s reply to the Lok Sabha, and, as of last year, 29 crore calls nationally. The Ministry of Railways also received more than 300 crores for implementing emergency response systems. Although funded entirely by the Nirbhaya Fund, recent marketing of 112 has shifted to it being essential for disaster management. This might be because women reporting sexual violence have not formed the majority of calls not because women are unaware of 112, but because the state is unaware of what sexual violence does to a person.

Can a phone number serve as an antidote for people experiencing sexual violence silenced by a culture of repression? A culture built precisely to continue that very violence. It is integral to the caste and gender order on which India operates that people remain quiet about sexual trauma. Whether passively or actively, oppressive forces continue to depend on the silence of women. Like with the historic and ongoing sexual violence committed by Indian security forces against adivasi women in Bastar and the Kashmiri people. Or when a landowner from a dominant caste sexually abuses women primarily from oppressed castes and tribes who are forced to work for mere coins in his fields. It is difficult to imagine that phoning 112 to file an emergency complaint against a soldier or the friend of a sarpanch would bring justice for any one of those women.

In any case, were a woman to find her footing after jumping over the hurdles and harms of disclosure, she would then run into the fact that 112 response systems are typically managed by the police. In Bihar, for example, it is operated at Patna’s “Bihar Police Radio Headquarters” which has 100 call-takers. The state’s police were also able to acquire 1,200 emergency response vehicles “equipped with mobile data terminals and GPS navigation”. Naturally, it is unlikely these vehicles financed by the Nirbhaya Fund would be driven exclusively for chase-car  battles against gendered violence.

Consider, for example, the reality of vulnerable girls sexually abused in a Muzaffarpur shelter home by politicians and others with a strong connection to a man named Brajesh Thakur. Would ringing up the police and filing a complaint against a party strongman be possible for a young girl with intellectual disabilities trapped in the ‘shelter home’? Would it be ‘safe’?

Was the imagination of 112 then that the conversation of violence would be easy to have with police, an institution we know to be, in the best of cases, hostile, and in the worst case dangerous for women and marginalised communities? What does it mean to have the police, known for its structural reinforcement of violence, as your first point of contact to relate a deeply intimate and terrible experience? To pick up the phone and know that you have everything to lose and nothing to gain. 

It is not just through indirect transfer that police across the country have benefited from the fund. Cyber crime prevention consumed over 170 crores. Don’t you feel like you are browsing on the safest, most secure internet? ‘Women help desks’ in police stations grabbed another 159.6 crores. Delhi Police’s Special Police Unit for Women and Children and Special Police Unit for North-Eastern Region gobbled up 21 crores for “New building with Women Centric Facilities”, while their vague ‘Safety of Women scheme’ took another 9 crores.

Just short of a cumulative 500 crores readily given to the police for the above projects; the same Indian police that has done little to support victims and survivors, and, in fact, systematically creates more. Even if one were to believe in the police as a pathway to justice, it is difficult to ignore, among other things, their (yes, even the women officers) role in forcing women to drop charges of rape. Even within the ‘reform’ framework, why keep throwing bigger blank cheques at something that fails to change?

Where is care?

In Delhi, the disbursal for “social workers/counsellors” was 5.04 crore. Less than the cost of the tablets purchased by the Ministry of Railways. Does this not clarify the priorities of the government, and how it does not care? It does not care about the complex needs of survivors. It is more interested in building smart cities devoid of well-paid public sector social workers. Workers that could have, instead of the police, been (and are) an important touchstone for women carrying trauma. Caseworkers profiled by The Third Eye speak of the extremely important role they play in intervening and advocating for girls and women “in situations of murder, rape, abduction, child sexual abuse, dowry deaths and domestic violence.” Thousands of crores wasted on tech and tyranny while women doing the grunt labour of real material and emotional support at risk of retraumatizing their own selves get absolutely nothing. Nothing.

The Fund’s ambit is otherwise empty of mental or physical health. The body of the person who has experienced sexual violence is seen primarily through the perspective of forensics and medical procedures, not holistic health. Examinations and treatments. In public discourse too, they remain gripped in the event itself. Gruesome details, false or true, about their body become headlines. Almost perversely the country revels in ‘knowing’ more and more about a person’s trauma while doing nothing right by anyone involved in it. The body floats in news and slogans detached from personhood. The Nirbhaya Fund neither had nor continues to have significant space for ground work to speak directly with survivors about their healthcare needs. Not even a pretence of a bottom-up approach.

Maybe the public itself wants the figure of the survivor to be one of unrelenting grief. An empty receptacle through which it can raise its own demands of capital punishment which in its mind absolves society from any larger transformation. Perhaps, recovery is intentionally made out of reach so that the country can continue performing revenge. So that we can ignore answering why rape and violence against women occurs. How men necessarily must enact this violence in order to maintain their status as men. The class that benefits from women being violated. We must remain distracted by apps and cameras and cops as the compensations to survivors barely show up and crores and crores and crores get poured down the drain. We must never care or think of care. How to care for ourselves, for each other, and for survivors on their own terms.

We are being scammed

One note to make is the inconsistency of budgetary claims made by the current BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government. A 2022 press release by the Ministry of Women and Child Development stated that “Rs. 9549.04 crore has been appraised” since the fund’s inception. Just a year before that, however, a release by the same Ministry identified “Rs. 9764.30 crore” as the appraisal for the same period. The appraisal amount was somehow 215 odd crores higher in 2021 than in 2022. Maybe a miscalculation worth the same as the earnings of Salman Khan starrer Bharat is minor to the Narendra Modi government. Nevertheless, this remains unacknowledged and uninvestigated.

Another discrepancy that arises in the public information released by the Ministry is the distinction between allocation, release and utilisation. In 2021, Smriti Irani, then Minister of Women and Child Development, cited “Rs. 6212.85 crore” as the allocation amount of which “Rs. 4087.37 crore has been disbursed / released [and] a sum of Rs. 2871.42 crore [which] has been reported to be utilised”. Interesting to note the distance the language itself maintains from the question of utilisation. In any case, the utilisation, according to this, stood at 46%.

From 2022 onwards, the memos lose the category of ‘allocated’ funds and the separation between ‘released’ and ‘utilised’ entirely. Utilisation is not reported at all in Smriti Irani’s 2022 release mentioned earlier. By 2024, Irani’s language collapses ‘release’ and ‘utilisation’ by claiming that the “total amount released by the Ministries / Departments and utilised out of the Nirbhaya Fund since inception is Rs 5448.0945 crore which is nearly 75% of the total allocation.” We have come from a situation where a meagre 46% of the allocated budget was ‘utilised’ in 2021 (whether it was effectively implemented remains a different story), to one where this number has been transformed into 75%! The magic of consultancy approved false data.

Throughout COVID, we saw reports of a declining public infrastructure such as with lifting and distribution of food grain due to a myriad of practical obstacles. Yet, the slowly and steadily shrinking corpus has somehow managed to increase its efficacy! Twisting words and numbers, among a series of predictable choices, failed to serve Smriti Irani who got booted out after the 2024 general elections. Her successor, Annapoorna Yadav, in her reply to the Lok Sabha a few months after Irani’s disclosure maintains the release/utilisation integration by insisting usage is at an all-time “76%” high. Laughably, PR of the Fund has claimed the latest Union budget has “doubled” it to “Rs 200 crores” without contextualising that when it was announced in 2013, the Nirbhaya Fund had committed and budgeted 1,000 crores every year.

There are also some items in the corpus releases that are simply stunning. They could feature in an episode of Pankaj Kapur’s evergreen Office, Office.

One should take a survey of women in Uttar Pradesh if almost 81 crore rupees has now guaranteed their ‘safety in public transport’, and if they know how their money was actually put to use. Karnataka’s plan to ‘train women for heavy passenger vehicles’ is concerning in the context of the Fund’s origin in the incident where a woman was raped and murdered in a city bus. As is the 231 crores driven into ‘self-defense’ training targeted at girls but not sex education developed in conversation with all children. Is the logic that Nirbhaya would be ‘safe’ if she knew how to just drive the bus? Or if she knew taekwondo? The problem, to be clear, is not the move to skill women in fields that are gender imbalanced, but rather why that money must be requested and granted from a fund responding directly to sexual violence. A generous reading could say that women on the bus may ‘feel safer’ with a woman driving. But how is that a long-term solution when the BMTC keeps slashing bus fleets? Absurdities include bizarre disbursals like that of the ‘Nirbhaya Pink Toilet’ in Uttar Pradesh. Is this Ajay Bisht (Adityanath) admitting that Modi’s Swachh Bharat Scheme failed? 

No solutions, only symptoms

If one were to believe in the state project, the question would naturally be: couldn’t this money be put to better use (whether we do actually believe where the money went is a separate story)? Couldn’t the thousands of crores that have gone into making the camera infrastructure of cities ‘smarter’ be put towards crafting and implementing robust sex education policies for this country’s youth? Of course, then the question of fair pay for the resource-starved government teachers would remain. Couldn’t the government put this budget towards building and maintaining free public quality housing for survivors of sexual violence, and for whomever they want to share that space with if anyone? To support them in their long-term holistic health both recovery and otherwise, including free mental health support, access to community workers who understand the recurring impacts of sexual abuse? To strengthen access to free abortion clinics or free access to creches and anganwadis? That is, of course, if we didn’t slash the former down to 3,900 in the whole country and the latter to a place where women employed in them can’t get livable wages, regularised jobs or pensions. Can we fund more social and health workers? Even though victim compensation is slated in the table and received 200 crore rupees, the majority of it continues to stay out of the hands of survivors. (States have their own compensation schemes, but this article will limit itself to solely the Nirbhaya Fund’s ambit and delivery.) But, no, let governments stick to the gimmicks and gaffes. The demands for the noose. Acting out righteousness. A theatre of outrage. All of which means nothing.

In any case, this line of argument has contained itself largely to the liberal arena of behaviour and expenditure. Not an unimportant exercise, we do a disservice by convincing ourselves this language is the horizon of liberation rather than a cloud among many. 

This misrepresentation of numbers in scattered replies is all very intriguing to dig into. Not least because it is coming from the public purse. A purse that includes, despite the government’s incredible attempts to hide the fact, the earnings of women thrown back at our faces in the form of big, red switches. But discrepancies aren’t the problem. Even if all the costings and expenditures lined up and projects carried out efficiently, The Nirbhaya Fund offers no solutions and only entrenches the existing problems of caste and patriarchy. It misdiagnoses the roots of sexual and gender-based abuse, and prescribes the wrong remedies for it. In short: it can never do any or more of the things listed in the passage above. The political, economic and social systems in place will not allow that. Isn’t that the point? Addressing sexual violence means the annihilation of caste and gender. That would mean undoing Indian society as we know it. Why would those invested in and profiting from society as it exists rather than a world that could exist be interested in this undoing?

There are larger questions whether you believe or do not believe in state or capital. There is something vital to contend with. How do we, as people, sit with the fact that caste and gender necessarily order sexual violence as part of their continuation? Is that not what arranged marriage is? Sanctioned large scale violence against women to maintain caste hierarchy? Is that not what landlordism in India is? Abject violence against oppressed caste women as though they were the fiefdoms of upper caste men? The existence of caste and gender mandates we drain ourselves of freedom and life. Subjugation is, then, central to the project, not a byproduct. There are many radicals engaging with these questions. The neoliberal nexus of state and capital patently cannot do the same for that would lead to the exposure of things like the Nirbhaya Fund as a farce.

What happens when recipes for combating sexual violence leave only carceral crumbs? Little hardware pieces floating in front of our eyes, seeping into our brains distracting us from what’s real. Perhaps, that’s the point. This continual focus removes the possibility of imagining something different. Not a thought is given to what infrastructure exists (or more importantly, does not exist) to support survivors. Care is missing because it must. Because if we paused to care, to just take a moment to sincerely think and feel care, we would be righteously compelled to use 1,000 crores every year to burn everything down.

This article was first published on February 24, 2025.