Though we are living in a modern and advanced world but our systems still lacks in overall safety issues of women. In most cases, the key responsibility of women is for child care arrangements and weekly shopping.
Also, working women are much more prone than men to be shuttling these tasks and to be using public transport. To top it all, it is commonly seen that women have less access to their private modes of transport as compared to men. Hence, women are more dependent on public transport than men.
Mostly, as a broader view, women make up more than half of every country’s population. So it should be apparent that public transport is crucial to how they get moving about the town or city.
Yet there are too many barriers and issues to women using public transport. This includes cost, expediency, and most considerably, terror of physical abuse, predominantly at night. Generally considering, public transport is chiefly important for women in low income suburbs.
The usage of public transport by women is different in ways from men. Consider this, they are more likely to travel in off-peak timings, they are mostly accompanied by others like they have to drop and pick children to and from school or have to take older, weak relatives to hospitals or clinics.
Older women are more dependent on public transport to make long journeys also. All this makes them more vulnerable while using public transport. So, safety issues of women using public transport has to been considered seriously.
There are innumerable incidents when women get sexually assaulted on trains and buses. There are several misconceptions about such cases of violence, but these things do happen and the count of such episodes is shocking.
Sometimes some of such incidents come out but most of them get buried. The frequencies of such cases are alarming. According to a survey, 43% of women using public transport are sexually abused.
All these fears about personal safety issues of women discourage women from using public transport.
To cater to the safety issues of women using public transport some special needs should be best served through programs that include:
• Improve general access to transport.
• Invest more in public transports to make it more secure for women.
• Increase the frequency of transport services.
• Consider all the related public safety issues of women using public transport.
• A code of conduct for public transport drivers should be followed.
• A policy on safety of women using public transport should be made by Government.
• Every Government while forming policy towards public transport should have in mind the importance of bus and rail/train services for women, who in general, have less access to private transports like cars and two wheelers and hence have greater fears for their personal safety.
• Police vans with women officials should be deployed around the city to cater to safety issues of women.
The safety issues of women using public transport should be a national concern.
