Sanjeev Sanyal: The eyes on the street

Crimes against women are rising due to poor urban design and governance

Urban crimes, particularly those directed at women, have been a cause of growing outrage in India over the last couple of years. Given the frequency and nature of some of these crimes, the outrage is entirely justified. But why are we witnessing such a sharp increase in crimes against women? Self-styled social activists and intellectuals love to rant on television about outdated sociocultural mores and traditional patriarchal attitudes. However, there is reason to believe that such factors play no more than a small role in feeding this growing problem.

Take, for example, Kolkata, a city that was once famed for being safe for women. I have personally witnessed how it has steadily become less safe for women since the early 1980s. Is this because Bengalis have suddenly become more patriarchal? Indeed, there is no evidence that crimes against women are greater in the more traditional Indian cities like Madurai, Udaipur, Ahmedabad, Surat or Thiruvananthapuram.

Instead, the increase in crime is being reported from the more "modern" cities like Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR) and Mumbai. Even within Delhi, it is remarkable that all the high-profile incidents occurred in the newer parts of the city and not in traditionalist Old Delhi. Clearly, "traditional attitudes" is not the full story. One can even make the opposite case in some parts of the country. Guwahati has seen a rise in crimes against women in recent years, including a televised mob lynching. Yet, women have traditionally enjoyed high social status in Assam and other north-eastern states. The recent trend, if anything, is a deviation from traditional values.

Violent urban crime, including those targeted at women, are not unique to India. Cities in the United States witnessed a sharp deterioration between the 1960s and 1990s. Jane Jacobs, one of the greatest urban thinkers of the 20th century, closely observed this period of urban collapse and concluded that the key factor that kept cities safe was "eyes on the street" - the fact that people were watching.

Note that "eyes on the street" is not about having a crowd. A road with heavy traffic may have a lot of people, but they are merely passing through and not engaging with their surroundings. In contrast, a street vendor or an old retiree on a park bench is likely to be observing what is going on.

In the Indian context, the "eyes on the street" were traditionally provided by the ecosystem of the "nukkad" - the local barber, the grocery shop, the paan-wala, the chai-wala, the nosey neighbour and so on. This general model has many variants ranging from the "pol" in Ahmedabad to the "para" in Kolkata.

The problem is that modern urban planning has completely disregarded this "software" aspect of the city. In the pursuit of a false aesthetic ideal, planners segregated the multiple activities that give life to urban ecosystems. Commerce and street life were deliberately zoned away from where people lived, thereby leaving few spaces for informal social interaction.

So, when Kolkata expanded into Salt Lake and then more recently into Rajarhat, the "para" did not follow since so-called planning made no provision for the locals to gather together for the evening "adda" at the "rock". Not surprisingly, the newer areas remain more crime-prone than the old city. We find the same phenomenon in other parts of the world. It is no coincidence that the hopelessly crime-ridden "banlieues" of Paris were built using the ideas of the same Le Corbusier who continues to dominate Indian urban thinking.

The second important ingredient for a safe city is visible governance. Routine rule-breaking is a fact of life in India. Most of the time, it involves nothing more than giving small bribes or breaking traffic rules, but a visible lack of governance attracts further rule-breaking. The most commonly quoted illustration of this point is the "broken window theory". As numerous studies have shown, if you leave a car or a house with a broken window, it soon attracts others to completely vandalise it.

The most famous application of the broken window theory was mayor Rudy Giuliani's crackdown on petty crimes in New York in the 1990s. During the following decade, crime rates dropped dramatically - although some commentators argue that other factors may have also played a role. In India's case, however, there is a general sense that the system is simply unable or unwilling to punish the guilty for big crimes or small. Even terrorists can escape punishment if it is politically convenient. Thus, the rise in rapes is closely related to the increase in crimes ranging from large-scale corruption to violent road rage.

In Kautilya's Arthashastra, this situation is called matsya-nyaya, or law of the fish (in other words, the big fish eat the small). That is why Kautilya argues that the rule of law is the single most important responsibility of the state. As certain recent events have illustrated, no amount of public espousing of "modern" or "liberal" values can substitute for the legal system when it comes to ensuring justice for women.

The good news is that once governance has been established in an urban ecosystem, it requires relatively little overt action to sustain it. In the 1970s, Singapore cracked down severely on criminal gangs but also introduced steep fines on petty things such as spitting and littering. Today, a visitor to Singapore may go for weeks without even spotting a policeman (unlike in an Indian city). I have also never met anyone who has been fined for littering. Yet, the overall sense of governance remains.

To conclude, the blaming of violent crimes against women merely on sociocultural values may serve the ideological agendas of some people, but it is diverting attention from the real business of solving the problem. As discussed above, urban design and the rule of law must be an important part of the solution.

Sanjeev Sanyal is an economist, urban theorist and the author of Land of the Seven Rivers