Women

The Bengaluru Needs You team participating in the Walk for a Safer City on International Women’s Day

Bengaluru Needs You launched a ‘Women’s Safety Campaign’ in January 2014 by introducing the SafetiPin app in our city. The app helps citizens conduct location-based safety audits through their smartphone. The data collated through the app helps analyse the safety issues in neighborhoods and around workplaces. The mobile app also allows users to upload information on harassment and public hazards along with sharing information about police stations and hospitals. The data generated by this campaign is then collated and shared with elected representatives enabling them to take immediate measurable action. The safety audit has 9 parameters – eight objective – light (at dark), openness, visibility, people, security, walk path, public transport, gender diversity; and one subjective parameter – feeling.

With Safetipin, users can get a map-based view of the concerned locality, community and city – supported by pictures, comments and scores.The application is available in iOS 7 and Android software for free. Dr. Kalpana Viswanath and Mr. Ashish Basu are founders of this unique application. The Safetipin App has been used by hundreds of our volunteers under the guidance of our team members in many clusters in Bangalore, including Byatarayanapura – 115 audits, Frazer Town- 89 audits and RT Nagar- 37 audits.

Open Safety Audit Mapping

The audits in Byatrayanapura ward were presented and discussed as part of the final output of a detailed study on Byatrayanapura ward by Urban Action Interns. The presentation was made to a panel comprising of city experts as well as the Office of the Municipal Ward Corporator of Byatrayanapura. The audits in Frazer Town were presented to the residents of the area in a public park in the form of giant maps printed on flex, along with an interactive ‘Community Problem Mapping’ an ideating exercise. An orientation session on Safetipin has been conducted for a group of NSS students at MSRIT (Ramaiah) College- they conducted 35 audits in a 2km radius around the college campus.

Bengaluru Needs You’s partnership with SafetiPin aims to tap into the spirit of collaboration among citizens to make our neighbourhoods safer. As a pilot, we submitted this project in the OpenIdeo Challenge on Women’s Safety and made it to the penultimate stage of screening. We look forward to conducting many more safety audits, with increased collaborations with other NGOs, corporates, institutions and organisations and use the data effectively working with the government bodies to ensure that Bangalore is rendered a much safer city.