Women safety is one of the most rising concerns in India. Going through the pages of newspapers, we come across a lot of headlines reporting cases of sexual assault, molestation, sexual harassment, rapes, trafficking, ill-treatment of women in houses, violence against women in remote areas, etc.
India has been ranked the most dangerous country for its women by The Thomson Reuters Foundation leaving behind countries like Afghanistan and Syria which are currently at war. Although this survey had given rise to a heated discussion all over the country, such a study is absurd. Our country has the most number of child marriages, missing cases of minor girls, female foeticide and rape against women.
Protesting about it will not help. We have to address this issue with a one-stop solution. Now technology is the new generation’s friend. It connects people just at the reach of their hand. A mere click on our smart phones brings people near to us virtually.
In accordance with this capability, many people are working on it to address the issue of women safety in India. Telematics technology would be a huge solution to end such problems of harassments especially to women who frequently travel by night.
To reduce the increasing number of rape and kidnapping in India the use of mobile phones which have become an inseparable part of our lives as the weapon of self-defence has become eminent.
However, women, teenagers as well as the elderly can make good use of in-built technology to use their mobile phones as an SOS tool in case of emergencies.
Women in India can now look forward to alerting their family and friends through the push of a button on sensing danger using a mobile application.
There are several applications which work on the transmission of a user’s GPS to determine the location and connect it to the preset list of emergency contacts. This is an appreciable step to provide solutions to ensure a woman’s safety at any location, until there is a change in time and also in the ethos of our democracy when we do not have to worry about the safety of our women.
Certain specifications of such newly developed applications are discussed below:
Automated activation:
Women safety applications are not supposed to be used every day and we also hope that there does not arise any time to use such apps, but we cannot predict time. During the time of panic, we often fail to connect to our closed ones because of the situation.
Solving these issues with the help of such applications not just by sending an SOS message but also almost everything that is happening around us is just a trigger away. A silent trigger integrated with the application can start the application to function by just pressing any button on the phone.
A distress message will be sent to the guardian every 5 minutes unless the user manually stops it when they feel safe. It will also send all the data around the user’s surroundings to the guardian.
SOS Alerts:
With 106 rapes taking place in a day, it has become necessary to find an interim solution to counter this issue. SOS alerts play the most important role in making emergency messages accessible. SOS alerts send messages to the user’s family and friends in distress situations.
This step was taken by many such social entrepreneurs, and it is a significant step for all those who want to make India a safer country for every woman. However, those apps lacked certain improvements. For instance, at the time of distress, there is no time for a woman to open the application and do the required. Thus certain developers are now designing such applications keeping in mind the required improvements.
Information to guardian:
Information from the phone/user’s surroundings is sent to the guardians after the activation of the application. Information like the location of the user, the surrounding voice and pictures are sent after compiling them in a report to the preset guardians as SMS.
Phone calls to the guardian:
The registered guardians also receive a call from the user’s mobile. An email with the compiled report is sent to the registered address, and this operation continues every 5 minutes until manually stopped. All this information can be used to track the victim’s location and unravel the probable emergency they are in.
By Syed Asif Sultan, Founder of SAWDHAAN Application
