Unsafe by design: Bad infrastructure keeps women watching their backs – fixing this would be a start

Imagine in a hospital there is an on-call room for doctors. Imagine that it is next to the nurse’s station where there is usually a lot of activity and people awake even through the night. Imagine now that this on-call room has about six to eight beds and two or three clean toilets and changing rooms. There are lights and one dim light is on at all times. Imagine that the door of this on-call room has a clear glass window on the top half of the room creating cross visibility. Imagine that there are such on-call rooms on each floor near the nurses station, and there are separate such on-call rooms for women, men and a gender neutral one for those who would like to use it – one may as well dream big.

Now, imagine that such on-call rooms had existed at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital.

The last few days since the August 9 rape and murder made headlines, there is a renewed debate on rape culture and the violence that women face, and a more specific conversation on unchosen risks faced by women doctors in in India. Gender inequality and its concomitant cultures of misogyny is something that needs long-term focus and attention alongside other intersectional hierarchies: caste, sexual rights, and the rights of the disabled among them. Even as women’s enrollment in higher education rises, their work participation has been decreasing. Even as more women enter medical colleges, not as many eventually practice.

Patriarchal attitudes change little and often an anxiety about women’s education and the fear that women will get above themselves, manifests itself in a lack of provision of basic infrastructure that would facilitate more women being able to access not just education but also employment. The lack of facilities for women in institutions can also be seen as a manifestation of this fear. Keeping it dangerous ensures that women are always on the back foot, literally watching their backs knowing that violence is always possible. The lack of an accessible on-call room for women cost the young doctor in Kolkata her life.

While these attitudes and ideologies might not change overnight, there is something that can be done immediately: infrastructure. It is not rocket science that lighting matters, nor is it obscenely expensive. Street lighting as well as lighting inside institutions and their campuses such as hospitals, hostels, universities, office buildings, courts can be a game changer in women’s access to and within these spaces. Well-lit public toilets and community toilets, for women, men as well as gender-neutral ones in accessible and populated places will proclaim that women belong in these spaces. A police force trained to know that their job is to facilitate, not restrict access, and whose background and records are carefully scrutinised, will be able to enable mobility rather than act as forces of surveillance or worse, violence themselves.

Infrastructure, especially in the context of institutional structures, matters – previously, I have pointed out that the December 2012 gang rape and murder of the young physiotherapy student in Delhi on a private blueline bus could not have taken place in the BEST bus in Mumbai for the simple reason that a group of men cannot take a BEST bus out for a joyride. Sadly, the BEST bus system in Mumbai is being dismantled slowly but surely. Attacks on infrastructure makes women not just less mobile but much less safe.

That infrastructure matters is clear from the fact that every time efforts are made towards providing facilities that enable greater mobility and inclusivity for women, there is deep anxiety. When the Delhi government put out a policy to provide free public transport for women in 2019 there was a huge outcry. Started in mid-2021, the Tamil Nadu government’s Vidiyal Payanam Thittam offers free bus travel in government-run buses to women, transgender people, and girls pursuing higher education. Karnataka launched free bus travel for women under its Shakti scheme in June 2023. Despite complaints and disgruntlement from mostly men, reports suggest that the outcome of the provision of such infrastructure have been transformative.

Free public transport creates the possibilities for women to commute and travel. Gender-neutral toilets recognise that gender is more than binary. Good lighting facilities movement within institutions allowing the more vulnerable to access them and continue to thrive. Infrastructure matters. The provision of infrastructure, or conversely, the failure to do so, is not accidental but ideological. If women’s safety is not prioritised, despite all kinds of lip service by different governments at the state and centre level, the infrastructure will not be provided. If women are expected to suck it up and tolerate abysmal working conditions as part of the trial by fire, then infrastructure will not be even discussed.

Providing infrastructure means making a concerted decision to prioritise working conditions and safety for all who live and work in an institution or indeed access public spaces. There is a much longer conversation to be had about the kind of infrastructure needed in different institutions, and safe on-call rooms are only one aspect of what hospitals and medical colleges need but there can be no differing opinion on the need for infrastructure.

Infrastructure can be provided in any context, including in an environment of misogyny and boys-clubs where men talk down to women, harass them and generally make it difficult for them to access employment and build their careers. It is not dependent on changing ideologies. This provision of such infrastructure is a feminist act that will contribute to challenging patriarchal and misogynist ideologies simply by facilitating access for women. This infrastructure cannot undo misogyny or rape culture but it can act towards preventing the kind of murder that just took place in Kolkata. I’m willing to stick out my neck and say that if the kind of on-call room imagined at the opening of this piece had still existed, that young doctor would still be alive.

Shilpa Phadke is co-author of Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets.

Also read:

What a brutal crime in a Kolkata hospital reveals about the dangers women doctors face in India

Rape, murder of Kolkata doctor highlight failure of workplace safety provisions for women