Paridhi Jain, a PhD scholar at the IIIT-D, and her teammates from the ‘PreCog’ research group, Megha Arora and Neha Gupta, have emerged victorious in FICCI’s ‘Strengthening the Policing Contest 2013 – Ensuring Women Safety in India’, beating a large number of participants from across the country.
In the backdrop of rising crime rate against women in India, which has resulted in a drastic 35 per cent drop in female tourist arrivals to the country, the trio’s proposal entitled ‘Safe Safari’ lists measures aimed at preventing such crimes in future.
Visibly disturbed by the present security scenario, the girls propose a couple of technological solutions to prevent recurrence of crimes against women and help them commute safely during any time of the day.
According to them, introduction of maps and navigational services on mobile devices have been significantly helpful for women commuters as they provide information on possible routes between two locations, along with distance and estimated time of travel. “However, these services do not consider safety of the suggested routes,” they say, adding they have proposed introduction of Safe Google Maps, where each suggested route is associated with a risk score, vulnerable and insecure areas, and police stations nearby.
The girls also caution about scenarios where none of the possible routes is completely secure. For such cases, they propose Auto-Track-on-Request, another mobile application which gives the woman traveler an option to request tracking by a Central Monitoring System (CMS).
Paridhi, Megha and Neha, who made a presentation based on their proposal at theFICCI’s conference on Homeland Security – 2013: Safe and Secure Nationheld on July 23-24 in New Delhi and were presented with their winner’s trophy, say that preventive measures can be taken after studying the available data on crime against women.
The girls, who feel that their proposal is “feasible, innovative and implementable”, are hopeful of its acceptance by various stakeholders in near future.
“Safety of women in India is an issue of major concern, and we are trying to contribute in our own way to prevent crimes against women,” say the girls, while recalling the heinous December 16, 2012 gang rape of a girl in a moving bus in Delhi as a result of which she died after having suffered brutal internal and external injuries during the assault.
“It’s a nice experience to work on the issue of security. We hope that our proposal will help improve the plight of women in our country,” they say.
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