Delhi gangrape effect: 1 in 3 women quit or reduce working hours

The gangrape of the 23-year old girl in a moving bus has not only left women jittery but also impacted work productivity during the last fortnight as one in three female workers have either reduced working hours after sunset or quit jobs after the incident , reported the _Economic Times t_oday.

The report has quoted a random survey by industry body Assocham’s Social Development Foundation (ASDF), which said that IT and BPO companies in Delhi-NCR have been affected to the extent of 40 percent ever since the Delhi rape incident.

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The industry body surveyed 2,500 women and said the decline in productivity was due to long hours and shift jobs. It highlighted that around 82 percent of the women respondents from Delhi, Noida, Faridabad and Gurgaon said they have started leaving early after the sunset. The anxiety is more among those women who travel by buses, chartered buses, three-wheelers and metro.

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However, none of the women who were surveyed had lodged a formal complaint to any kind of authority. Crime statistics only reflect those crimes that are reported to the police. “Therefore, violence experienced by women on public transport never enters the crime statistics, even though it is serious and rampant,” D S Rawat, Assocham secretary-general said in a statement.

The incident has also impacted the productivity of the women workforce in major cities like Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Jaipur and Dehradun.

In a nation of 1.2 billion people, where official crime statistics say a woman is raped every 28 minutes, law enforcement and prosecution measures are abysmal.

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According to an earlier Assocham survey of about 2,500 women and men in various cities just after the Delhi incident, 92 percent of working women said they felt insecure, especially during the night, in all major economic hubs across the country. Most of the respondents felt that it’s high time the quality of governance should be improved and the obsession of the police “bandobast” for the VVIPs should be changed.

The survey had said majority of respondents felt that the deployment of more police personnels would be there for few days and after that everything will be back to usual.

Meanwhile, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) and FICCI Ladies Organisation (FLO) have decided to set up an Industry Task Force on Safety of Women, which would look at developing a National Safety Policy for women.