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Neeru Verma
Assistant Professor
Dr. K. N. Modi University
Modinagar, District Ghaziabad, pin – 201204
ORCID ID- https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8391-5308
Abstract— The integration of digital surveillance infrastructure into urban governance has become a defining feature of the global smart city movement, with women’s safety frequently invoked as a central justification for the deployment of CCTV networks, facial recognition systems, and emergency response applications. In India, this logic has taken concrete institutional form through the Nirbhaya Fund and the associated Safe City Project, launched in the aftermath of the December 2012 Delhi gang rape, which has funded extensive surveillance infrastructure across eight major cities. This paper critically examines the relationship between women’s safety and surveillance in smart cities, drawing on feminist geography, feminist human-computer interaction, and critical surveillance studies scholarship to interrogate the assumptions underlying techno-centric safety interventions. Drawing on the documented work of Ayona Datta and collaborators on India’s “smart safe city,” alongside comparative scholarship from South Korea and elsewhere, the paper argues that while surveillance infrastructure can offer tangible safety benefits, it also risks producing a narrow, victim-centred, and often exclusionary vision of women’s safety that displaces attention from the structural and infrastructural conditions of gendered urban insecurity, while simultaneously raising significant concerns regarding privacy, consent, and the disproportionate surveillance of marginalised women.
Keywords— women’s safety, smart cities, surveillance, Safe City Project, gendered infrastructure, feminist geography, CCTV, privacy
References
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