What the Uber cab rape case says about the city

"An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport," argues Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogota, Colombia, who has tried to change the way the city uses public transport. The magnitude of the task is evident from a 2014 survey by YouGov and The Thomson Reuters Foundation which asked more than 6,550 women and gender experts about their perceptions of safety for women in the city's transport system, and in which Bogota ranked as the most dangerous. Delhi is number four after Bogota, Mexico and Lima. According to a UN Habitat report on gender and urban life for 2012-13, this can "seriously jeopardise" women's role in the wider economy.

It's a sobering thought as we think about yet another rape in Delhi, this time of a young woman executive who made the all too human "'error"' of falling asleep in the backseat of her Uber car. Especially given that on the index of most unsafe cities for women to travel alone at night, Delhi was ranked at No 2.

There will be outrage against Uber for not verifying antecedents of the driver, and there should be.

There was outrage against the operators of the private bus in which the December 2012 rape took place, as there ought to have been.

But despite the government's talk about smart cities and smarter transportation, what is the distance we have travelled to make the cities secure for women?

None.

The khaps tell women it is wrong to use mobile phones, wrong to wear western clothes, wrong to eat certain food. They may also advise them now that it is wrong to be tired after a hard day's work and fall asleep in public. Occasionally we see a ray of hope in incidents like the Rohtak sisters who took on their harassers in a bus, but then we are confused about whether they are serial bullies or serial heroes, forgetting in the din that the driver and conductor of the bus did nothing to intervene in what was clearly a serious fracas, and instead just dumped the young women on the road. 

Does anyone even realise how complex the process is for a woman who wants to live a regular life in the city? Work till 7pm and then go out with her friends for a meal at a restaurant after work? It is a terrifying negotiation with a public space fraught with potential danger. Just consider this young woman. She was dropped by a friend to Vasant Vihar, from where she took an Uber cab which was to take her home to Inderlok. Why should that be a death defying odyssey at 9pm at night in the country's Capital? Why should crossing 37km from Gurgaon to Inderlok, a distance Google Maps says should take 56 minutes on NH8, be such an ordeal?

It is. And that should be enough to make our policy makers and smart city thinkers hang their heads in shame. If a city cannot allow its women to dress, speak, behave, live, work and travel the way they want, then it has no right to call itself that.