How to transform public safety in India

With rapid urbanization due to increasing population and urban

migration, public safety and security has become a key issue.

A "smart city" is also a "Safe city" which must enhance city performance on safety and security for citizens to
thrive as a city. A 'Safe' city is a pre-requisite to create an attractive economic and social environment for the
citizens, and to attract the investments for the growth of smart city.

The UN and the World Bank both rank high crime rate as one of the obstacles to a country's development .
Crime, in a country, creates a vicious cycle causing misery, instability, economic downturn and unemployment.

As per National Crime Records Bureau of India report on mega cities which includes the top 53 cities with
population more than 1 million, the average rate of crime in urban agglomeration centres is 345.9(Crime
Incidence per lakh population),which is 60 percent higher than the national average crime rate of 215.5(Crime
Incidence per lakh population). These 53 cities have accounted for 41.1percent of the total auto theft cases in the
country, 28.0 percent of total cheating cases and 29.4 percent of total counterfeiting cases.

Mega-cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata have accounted for 13.0 percent, 6.3 percent 5.6 percent
and 4.7 percent respectively of the total crimes reported from the 53 mega- cities. As per the National Crime
Records Bureau of India report, Delhi city has reported the highest incidents of sexual crimes accounting for 29.4
percent of total cases reported under 'Rape', 25.8 percent of 'Assault on woman with intent to outrage her
modesty' and 23.9 percent 'Insult to the modesty of women' respectively during 2013.

With rapid urbanization due to increasing population and urban migration, public safety and security has become
a key issue which needs urgent attention as it is key pillar for quality of life in cities.
In India, we have multiple public safety agencies like the police for citizen safety and security, fire agency for fire
safety; disaster management agencies to handle disasters; multiple public and private emergency management
services to handle medical emergencies; NGOs and other agencies for women & child safety;other domestic
public safety issues like gas leakage is handled by local gas dealers at city level.

There needs to be greater collaboration among these agencies which can improvedelayed responses for a public
safety situation and loss of life/property. In some cases, there have been reported instances when critical public
safety advisory and alerts raised by various international/national/state level agencies have been missed.