Nirbhaya case: Prioritise Safe Cities scheme, PMO tells WCD ministry

Five years after the Centre formed the Nirbhaya Fund, a corpus to fund women safety schemes, following the gruesome gangrape-murder of a paramedic student on the streets of the Capital, the Prime Minister’s Office has directed the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development to prioritise the Safe Cities initiative over existing schemes funded by the corpus. 

The Safe Cities scheme, launched by the home ministry in 2017 to make eight cities safe for women, will cost somewhere around Rs 2,900 crore. Principal secretary to the PMO, Nripendra Mishra, has directed WCD officials, during the last review meeting of the Empowered Committee for the Nirbhaya Fund, to ensure that the funds in the corpus, which currently amounts to Rs 3,100 crore, should not be utilised for existing schemes unless the Safe Cities initiatives takes flight. 

The eight cities that come under the initiative are Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Lucknow and Hyderabad. The home ministry has already sent proposals for various schemes under the initiative, including emergency response systems, CCTVs, helplines, etc., in these cities. WCD has approved most of these proposals, following the PMO directive. 

Before the Nirbhaya Fund was diverted to drive the Safe Cities initiative, over 22 schemes from various ministries were funded by the corpus. Prominent of these were home ministry's Emergency Response Support system, the Central Victim Compensation Fund and the Cyber Crime Prevention against Women & Children. In addition, there was railway ministry's Integrated Emergency Response Management System, the IT ministry’s project on developing panic-switch based safety device for cars and buses and the WCD ministry's One Stop Crisis Centre. All of these schemes will take a backseat. 

As per the new development, the Centre, last week, has released grants to the tune of Rs 667 crore under the Safe Cities initiative to Bengaluru. On the other hand, the railway ministry’s bid to manage resources from the Nirbhaya Fund to install CCTVs at all stations was rejected by the Empowered Committee. Railway officials are now mulling raising the requisite amount of Rs 2,500 crore through a loan, through its financial body the Indian Railways Finance Corporation.