Finance Ministry referred proposal back to WCD Ministry for more concrete ideas
The wait for the use of the much-hyped Rs 1,000-crore Nirbhaya Fund just got longer, almost a year since it was announced by the Centre.
The Finance Ministry has asked the Woman and Child Development (WCD) Ministry, which submitted its proposal for use of the Fund for enhancing safety for women as early as September last year, to fine tune the proposal.
WCD Ministry had sent a draft proposal to the Finance Ministry seeking Rs 487.5 crore for use over 2.5 years to create safer environment for women. The Ministry proposed to create mechanisms to ensure speedy justice to rape victims and also create safe spaces to allow free movement of women.
They even proposed a scheme for vulnerability mapping, opening of response centres and creating awareness for enhancement of safety and security of women in 32 towns, each with a population of over one million-in the first phase.
The note has been referred back to the WCD with the suggestion for submitting more concrete ideas. “The proposal hasn’t been rejected. There were some queries about a few schemes, to which we will rework and revert by the end of this month,” said an official.
In mid-December last year, the Finance Ministry had given its in-principle approval to Ministries of home and information technology, roads transport and highways (MoRTH) and railways to use Nirbhaya funds to work on measures to enhance safety of women.
The Home Ministry had proposed to integrate police administration with the mobile phone network to trace and respond to distress calls with minimum response time. The ministry with IT had proposed to compulsorily introduce an SOS button in all handsets.
MoRTH had proposed setting up mandatory Global Position System (GPS) for tracking and enforcement in all public transport vehicles. Railway Ministry got a go-ahead for setting up an SOS alert system in trains in select zones with call recording facility.
In February 2013, Finance Minister P Chidambaram had announced that setting up of the Nirbhaya Fund corpus of Rs 1,000 crore to step up safety measures for women.