First project under Nirbhaya Fund approved

More than a year after it announced the Rs 1,000-crore Nirbhaya Fund, the government approved its first project on Thursday evening.
under the scheme

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) gave the green signal to a project aimed at making public transportation secure for women by installing Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and closed-circuit cameras (CCTV) on public transport buses to enable their real-time monitoring and tracking. Public transport buses will also have an emergency panic button linked to local police stations.

The CCEA-approved project will be implemented in 32 cities with a population of over a million at a cost of Rs 1,400 crore. There was no immediate information on the quantum of funding for the project under the Nirbhaya Fund.

The Centre had announced the Nirbhaya Fund after a 23-year-old woman was brutally gangraped in a moving bus in Delhi in December 2012. The girl, dubbed Nirbhaya, subsequently died in a Singapore hospital. The incident sparked huge protests in the capital and across the country and brought to the fore the need for safe and secure public transport in the country.