Women’s insecurity increased rapidly in National Annual Report and Index (NARI)
For the safety of women, marshals, sparkling street lights, cameras may be installed everywhere for monitoring, but the truth is that now there are less cities left, where women are considering themselves safe. Most women believe that even though the lights may be there, it is a scary experience for them to get out at night. Recently, National Women’s Commission Chairman Vijaya Rahatkar released the National Annual Report on Women’s Safety and Index (NARI) 2025, in which all these things came out. In this new report, for the safety of women, Indian cities have been tested on many criteria.
The chairman of the Commission said that the safety of women cannot be limited to law and order merely. This security affects every field of life like education, health, employment, traffic and even digital presence.
The report has been prepared by the Group of Intellectuals and Academys (GIA), Pavalue Analytics, The Northcap University and Jindal Global Law School. In this, 31 cities of all the states were taken and a survey was conducted on security on about 12,770 women.
In the survey, four cities of the safest cities of the country for women were from the Northeast. The list of safest cities included Kohima, Visakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar, Aizawl, Gattok, Itanagar and Mumbai. The cities of North India remained in unsafe cities. Patna, Jaipur, Faridabad, Delhi, Kolkata, Srinagar and Ranchi finished at the bottom of security. For this, gender equality, civil participation, police system and women-friendly infrastructure were the basis.
Kohima lived the most on this basis. The performance of cities like Patna and Jaipur proved to be weak at these points. Jaipur was placed at the lowest position in terms of women’s safety. Factors such as patriarchal attitude and lack of urban infrastructure were caused by their troubles.
The study showed that women feel the most vulnerable at night, especially at public transport and entertainment sites. 86 percent of women feel that they are more secure in their educational institutions during the day, but the night fills them with fear.
91 percent of women find their office safe, but about half of them do not know whether the POSH, posh law is applicable to prevent sexual harassment in their office. Women who knew about the posh law admitted that it is effective in the office. One of the women involved in the survey admitted that they were confident that the officials would take action on complaints related to security. 69 per cent of women consider the current security effort to be largely enough, while more than 30 per cent mention several deficiencies.
7 percent of women reported that in 2024 they had to face harassment in public places. This figure was 14 percent among women under 24 years of age. Women consider their neighborhood to be the most insecure. Women who believed this were 38 percent. Women who considered public transport as unsafe were 29 percent. It also came out in the survey that only one in every three victims informs the family about the incident of harassment and complains. This means that two women do not complain of harassment i.e. NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) also do not register most of the incidents.
An important thing came out that women’s trust in institutional reactions was weak. Only one in four women expressed confidence in officers with effective settlement of complaints.
Cities of freedom and fear
Safe city
Kohima
Visakhapatnam
Bhuvaneshwar
Aizawl
Gangtok
Itanagar
Mumbai
Unprotected city
Ranchi
Srinagar
Kolkata
Delhi
Faridabad
Patna
Jaipur