Exactly a year after the death of the victim brutally raped on a moving bus, the Finance Ministry on Monday approved the proposals put forward by Ministries of Roads, Railways and Home Affairs to enhance safety and security of women.
The first to submit their proposal, the Ministry of Home Affairs, which designed the solution in consultation with Ministry of Information Technology, will work to integrate police administration with the mobile phone network to trace and respond to distress calls with minimum response time.
According to their proposal, instructions will be issued by the Ministry of Information Technology to all mobile phone manufacturers to compulsorily introduce an SOS alert button in all the handsets. Manufacturers will also be instructed to launch SOS alert system in the existing handsets through free downloading of suitable software. Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) had proposed to ensure security in public transport covering 32 towns over two years.
With a mandatory Global Position System (GPS) for tracking and enforcement, the Ministry got a go-ahead to have a control room in every city having more than one million population to track public transport vehicles. With improved passenger information systems through smart phones, display on bus stops, MoRTH has also plans to have a text and e-mail complaint system for transport. The Railway Ministry got a go-ahead for launching a pilot scheme for setting up an SOS alert system in trains in select zones. The railway helpline system will have call recording facility and will cover all the service providers from all the telecom circles of mobile and landline networks. In February 2013, Finance Minister
P Chidambaram had announced that setting up of the Nirbhaya Fund corpus of `1,000 crore to step up safety measures for women.