There is a map of the Mayapuri industrial area that the public knows – grey factories belching smoke standing cheek-by-jowl with smaller units making pressure cookers, hangers and stainless steel utensils. The cramped, rented homes of low-income workers working on the assembly line clumped together in masses of haphazard rectangles, separated only by neat rows of paved roads.

And then, there is the map seared into Chanda Kumari’s mind — which road leads home, which one leads to trouble, when to hurry and when to tarry, which roundabouts one can afford to take and which one must avoid, and where groups of menacing men hang about, unafraid of either the barely functional CCTV or flickering streetlights.

In a 3km radius between her home and work, every house, kirana store and street is marked – the factory safe; some streets relatively safe and others only so until the sun is up; and a park the size of a football field forever unsafe, day and night.

“Yeh apna ilaka hai, hume pata hai kaha jana hai kaha nahi. (This is our area, so we know where to go and where not to go). Our safety is in our hands. These politicians make promises and leave,” said Chanda.

Each of the approximately 8,000 women who work in Mayapuri’s industrial area knows this map by heart — it has been charted painstakingly, often under harrowing circumstances, one unsafe lane at a time.

Chanda, 25, has learnt the price of her safety the hard way.

When a shoe packaging factory unit in Mayapuri relocated to Bahadurgarh in Haryana, 25km away, Chanda, who earned ₹8,000 a month, lost her job. The year was 2021, and the factory employed 50 people, including 30 women. Chanda worked from 8am to 8pm daily, wrapping shoes and sandals in paper and plastic. The 25-year-old lived five minutes away from the unit in Mayapuri, as did most other employees.

“The owner wanted all of us to work at the Bahadurgarh factory. The men went, obviously. Some took up rooms there, others decided to commute daily. But us women couldn’t have gone so far away. How would we have travelled back at night?” she asked.

Like Chanda, Delhi’s 11 million women face the scourge of violence in myriad and mundane ways in a city that has become an unfortunate emblem for the problems of public safety and order. And like her, they pay steep costs that are not just economic but also social and emotional.

Chanda, for example, has found her world shrinking from the 1,483 square km expanse of the national capital to a 3 sq km area that she can safely navigate.

She never leaves home post-sunset unescorted by a man – sometimes with her father and other times a brother or a cousin. Even prosaic tasks are peppered with anxiety.

“I sometimes visit the Sunday night market nearby, but always in a group. At least three women and one man. It’s the only way to be safe,” she said.

The national capital’s underbelly, and its unfortunate epithet, is its grim record of crimes against women. In 2022, data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) showed an average of three rapes a day and the highest rate of crime against women in a city. The city accounted for 29.04% of the 48,755 crimes against women reported in 19 major cities across the country. Mumbai and Bengaluru were a distant second and third.

Yet, Delhi is also the only Indian city where women’s safety is a regular election issue and one that even brought down a government. It’s the city that saw the biggest protests on women’s safety in decades, one that shook the central government, prompted changes in India’s rape laws, and awakened a generation.

In December 2012, the grisly gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old paramedical student shook the city out of its slumber, and thousands of people – students, parents, activists, the young and the old, men, women, children – marched to India Gate, demanding a safer city. Frothing public anger singed then chief minister Sheila Dikshit, who lost the elections the next year. Women’s safety was a key theme of both the BJP’s Narendra Modi and the AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal.

The then Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government announced a three-member panel, led by retired Chief Justice of India JS Verma. In April 2013, Parliament passed the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act after the recommendation of the Verma Committee. The same year, the then government also announced a ₹1,000 crore Nirbhaya Fund to overhaul infrastructure to augment women’s safety.

A decade on, the response is decidedly mixed. Utilisation of the Nirbhaya Fund is the subject of regular tussles between the government and Opposition in Parliament, stricter rape laws have not stemmed the tide of crimes against women, but experts argue that the reporting of crimes has risen multifold, and conversations on women’s safety are now in the mainstream, from classrooms and convention halls to political meetings and community addas.

“In the last decade, a lot of engagement has happened on the issue, especially when it comes to policing, last mile connectivity, and lighting in Delhi. But there’s more work to be done,” said Kalpana Vishwanath, co-founder of NGO SafetiPin.

In West Delhi, the issue plays out differently in the more affluent enclaves of Punjabi Bagh and Rajouri Garden, especially when compared to the working-class neighbourhoods of Mayapuri and Hari Nagar, where tens of thousands of women step out to work every day.

For Vijaya Lugani, 25, the problems only begin when the sun goes down. A software engineer, Lugani takes the Metro to her office in Noida twice a week, likes going to cricket matches in Kotla, weekly dinner with friends and cousins in Rajouri Garden, and the gym five minutes from home. “But if I am going to be late, my parents insist that I get dropped home by a friend… preferably a male friend,” said Lugani, who lives on Club Road.

Purva Chugh, 34, who lives in Tagore Garden and works in a law office in Rajender Nagar 9km away, follows a similar set of rules. “I feel safe if I am in my own car. I have never taken a bus, thankfully. When I drive, I avoid taking lanes; I always stick to the main road. And I don’t stop anywhere at night,” she said.

Chugh’s family prefers that she is home by 10pm daily, and that if she does step out at night, she has company. “Even I prefer that, no matter which part of Delhi it is – south, central, east or west,” she said, with a laugh.

Across classes, the underlying problem is the same – street safety. Till now, the response of the authorities has been focussed on installing more CCTV cameras. Last year, the public works department (PWD) told the Delhi assembly that there are 246,424 CCTVs on Delhi’s streets, installed by the state government. Apart from this, there are over 10,000 CCTV and automatic number plate recognition cameras installed by the Delhi Police; and an uncounted number of CCTVs outside homes, malls, hospitals, and shops by residents of the city.

But often, it’s not enough.

“When the first CCTV cameras were installed in our lane, I was hopeful that it would make our area safer. But over time, I have realised that these cameras capture the crime… They don’t stop the crime,” said a 25-year-old woman, who lives in Mayapuri Industrial Area phase-I.

In the space-starved colony of Mayapuri industrial area Phase I, Savitri Devi has a rare luxury – a government park. It also doubles up as a municipal facility comprising 20 toilets each for men and women, another critical utility in the low-income neighbourhood where most factory housing is bereft of private toilets. But the 34-year-old mother of three is too afraid to visit it herself or let her two daughters in.

“Just now, they caught a young man making videos of women inside the toilet, through a broken window. We don’t have a toilet inside the house, so we go to the sarkari one… Men, either drunk or under the influence of drugs, sit in the park and keep an eye on the women who enter the toilet,” she said.

Every time she has to use the bathroom, she looks for one other woman who can accompany her. “It fills me up with such fear,” she said.

Geeta Devi, 40, seeks similar company on her walk back home in Mayapuri from work in Hari Nagar at night. She works at a factory from 9am to 9pm daily and earns ₹5,500- ₹7,000 a month. “Often, I don’t complete the 12-hour shift,” she said, sheepishly.

“I walk to work each morning, and I return home on foot each night with three other women. If even two of them need to go home early, I cut my shift short and leave by 5pm. It’s not safe to return home alone at 9pm,” said Geeta, who is the sole breadwinner of her family of three.

But there is a drastic economic cost to these everyday negotiations for safety, the women have learnt.

“The only reason I return home sooner some days is because I am afraid of the city when the sun goes down. I am scared that I will be assaulted on the bus, the road, at the red light… The owner says he understands but I still must pay for it by taking a wage cut,” Geeta said.

Others take more drastic measures. Thirty-five-year-old Usha Devi, who lives in Chanakya Place and works in a garment packaging unit in Mayapuri 6km away, has stopped doing overtime. At her previous job, which was closer to home, overtime earned her some extra cash, but travelling in a bus at night back home now is daunting. “Sometimes people touch inappropriately, sometimes they say something wrong… These are common,” she said.

“I have never raised my voice, what’s the point? There is a marshal in each bus but even then, this happens.”

Experts have shown that the lack of safety forces women to make suboptimal economic choices, depressing their wages, shrinking their occupation avenues and even pushing them out of the workforce. Rajesh Kumar, general secretary (Delhi) of International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), said that the consequences for working women are huge. “It’s not possible that work will be within a 1km radius. Women, especially labourers, have to choose between not working at all and risking their safety for the sake of work. This is what happened with Chanda… She picked her safety over wages,” he said.

The two main contenders for the seat have very different approaches to resolving this problem.

The BJP candidate, Kamaljeet Sehrawat, said that robust last-mile connectivity could help make the constituency safer. “We have to accept that women commute late evening and at night due to work. They suffer in buses, taxis, autos, and on foot too. My aim will be to work on how to make their commute safer,” she said. Her campaign will lean on the fact that she is a woman, and on government campaigns focused on moral teachings and changing mind sets.

Mahabal Mishra, the AAP pick, is focussed on more CCTVs and credited the Delhi government for putting up hundreds of these in the neighbourhood. “If elected, I will install CCTV cameras in areas that don’t have them already. I will coordinate with the Delhi Police to put police chowki in parts of the constituency where women feel unsafe,” he said.

He advocates for factories to arrange car drops for women, but also says the onus lies on women to be safe. “The women of Delhi are educated, and have found their own ways to be safe… They will have to become more buland.”

West Delhi presents a microcosm of Delhi – from the slums of Madipur and the factories of Mayapuri to the green-tinged avenues of Vikaspuri and the gated colonies of Rajouri Garden.

The problems of street safety suffered by its women also sketches the outlines of gendered hostility and violence in the Capital – fending off grubby hands in public transport, avoiding dark nooks and roads that seem safe at first glance, making decisions not on aspirations but on anxiety, forever wary, forever calculating. It’s a feeling and a warning that one generation of women passed on to another. “We had similar hopes when streetlights first came to Mayapuri. But now I know it cannot give us security,” said Geeta. “For that, society has to change.”

And until it does, Chanda cannot go to the Sunday night market unescorted, Geeta cannot return home after sunset alone, and Savitri can’t let her daughters go to the toilet.

This is the sixth in a series of election reports from the field that look at national and local issues through an electoral lens.