As much as Rs1,273 crore of the Nirbhaya Fund — a 3,000-crore corpus to strengthen safety mechanisms for women — is still lying unused, even two years after it was set up in the wake of the brutal gangrape of a young girl in Delhi on December 16, 2012.
“A total amount of Rs3,000 crore was allocated to Nirbhaya Fund in 2013-2014, 2014-15 and 2015-16.
Only two proposals have been approved so far.
Committee on Economic Affairs,” said Maneka Gandhi, Women and Child Development Minister replying to a question in the lok Sabha.
So far, only two proposals to enhance women’s safety have been given a go ahead by the CCEA. First, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways’s proposal on ‘Security for women in Public Road Transport in the country’ with an estimated cost of Rs1,405 crore and second, a proposal of Ministry of Home Affairs for establishing an emergency response system to attend women in distress with an estimated cost of Rs321.69 crore, were approved.
Accordingly, an amount of Rs150 crore and Rs50 crore were provided to the Home and Road Ministries respectively for their sanctioned projects in 2014-15, the Minister said.
Apart from this, two schemes of WCD, namely One Stop Centre for Women worth Rs18.58 crore and Scheme for Universalisation of Women Helpline worth Rs69.49 crore, were approved to be funded under Nirbhaya Fund for implementation for the 2015-16 financial year.
The Government has assigned WCD Ministry as the nodal agency to appraise the scheme to decide their suitability to qualify for getting funds from the Nirbhaya Fund and to review and monitor the progress of schemes sanctioned under the fund.