A Fiscal Choke, a Hidden Report

“As a society, we should seriously dwell upon the atrocities being meted out to our mother, sisters and daughters,” said Prime Minister Narendra Modi from the ramparts of the Red Fort on 15 August 2024, India’s 78th Independence Day.

Yet, PM Modi’s words don’t sit well with his government’s report card on policies and schemes for women safety. 

The Nirbhaya case had first forced governments to think about women’s safety. A slew of schemes were launched in 2015 to ensure women get support to fight violence and abuse.

In the first two parts of this series The Reporters’ Collective analysed two critical schemes to protect women.

We accessed exclusive government records and travelled across two states – Delhi and Haryana – to find how the schemes have failed. In this third-part we reveal how the government had planned to fiscally smother the schemes even as it repackaged them under a new name, Mission Shakti. We are also making public the NITI Aayog study that details the failure of the Union government’s women safety schemes.

Budgetary Squeeze

The Union Ministry of Women and Child Development’s (WCD) five-year plan projected only a 13% budget increase collectively for four women protection schemes between FY 2021-22 and FY 2025-26. 

In real terms, as inflation eats into the value of money, this would effectively be a planned cut in the money being put behind the schemes. 

The numbers, even without accounting for inflation, don’t look good when compared with the overall budget of the government which increased by 38.39% (budgeted amounts) between FY22-25 . But the planned increase in the women's safety budget over the same period was only 7%. 

The women safety component of Mission Shakti, Sambal, currently covers four schemes: the Women Helpline, One Stop Centers, Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, and Nari Adalat. 

Government’s fiscal plan documents show the intention to pare down the Women Helpline to its bare bones. Launched in April 2015, the helpline was to hand-hold and connect women in distress with police, hospitals, and legal aid. 

From the start of Mission Shakti, the government planned to slash the expenditure on the Women Helpline to less than a third over five years (FY22-26),  shrinking it from Rs 72 to Rs 22 crore. 

This was the plan. What did the government actually spend on the specific scheme? One cannot tell. The government stopped disclosing expenditure on the sub-components of Mission Shakti from FY22. 

One can review the expenditure actually incurred on ‘Sambal’ which covers four women protection schemes, including the helpline service. 

In FY22 and FY23, the Union government spent only 31.2% and 34.7% of the promised funds for Mission Shakti’s women safety schemes.

For FY24, the government’s revised estimates show a spending of 82.2% of budgeted funds. The reality could still be more dismal. The government has a penchant for inflating the ‘revised estimates’. The actual expenditure on a scheme gets revealed only two years after the close of a financial year. The media and public don’t look back that far to see if the government had spent what it claimed to or not. 

The fiscal slow death of the schemes corroborates what we reported in the first two parts of this series. In part one we had reported on the failure of the One Stop Centre scheme. You can read it here. In part two we reported on the hollowing of the women helpline service. You can read it here. 

But, we are not the first ones to map this decay. The decay was first mapped by the government’s top think tank, NITI Aayog in a study. And the study was then kept hidden from the public. 

The Hidden Report

In March 2023, G Selvam, then Lok Sabha MP from Tamil Nadu, asked the WCD ministry about the status of the Women Helpline Scheme. 

In her reply, then WCD Minister Smriti Irani claimed the ministry found the scheme to be working well.

Irani’s response was based on a 2020-21 NITI Aayog study which had summarised the schemes to be “satisfactory” even as it recorded abysmal failure in its detailed review. We are making the entire report public because the truth is revealed when it is read in its entirety.

One can access the report here.

If you do not have the time to read the entire report, here is a brief summary of NITI Aayog’s findings on the critical women safety schemes:

One Stop Centres

One Stop Centres (OSCs) provide a range of services to women in distress. These include police and legal assistance, psychological counselling, and temporary shelter.

Started in April 2015, there are currently 786 OSCs operational in India.

The study, however, found that many women are unaware of these centres and their services, rendering the scheme largely ineffective. Public awareness of OSCs, it added, remains alarmingly low at around 4%, due to minimal Information, Education and Communication (IEC) activities. 

The allocation for training, IEC, and advocacy – Rs 50,000 annually per OSC – was deemed inadequate.

The government think tank admitted that the quality of this scheme couldn’t be assessed due to a lack of “available data or monitoring mechanism to capture beneficiary feedback and quality of services of the OSC”.

Video-conferencing facilities for police statements were available only in 33% of the centres, while only 42% had a pantry [required to run as temporary shelters]. About 92% had an adequate number of toilets and functioning CCTV cameras, the study noted.

These shortcomings were observed in 12 state capitals, which reportedly have better OSC facilities than the rest of India.

The study also flagged poor fund utilisation, low staff remuneration, and a general lack of transparent information on OSC services. 

It recommended extending the scheme’s coverage to transgender women, one of the most vulnerable groups.

Women Helpline

Launched nationwide in 2015, the helpline aims to connect women with relevant authorities like police, OSCs, and hospitals, acting as an intervening support system to ensure services are provided.

The NITI Aayog study found that only 23.5% of the 3,048 women surveyed knew about the helpline, with awareness highest in Delhi (45%) and lowest in Uttar Pradesh (8.7%).

While the study praised the helpline’s role during the COVID-19 lockdown, it criticised the way efficiency was evaluated, which solely relied on call numbers.

The NITI Aayog said it couldn’t assess the impact of the scheme since it did not have access to the data on the cases referred to OSC, police, and hospitals.

It recommended tracking cases based on outcomes and “use indicators such as number of cases closed, number of cases leading to the police or legal action, and number of women referred by WHL [women’s helpline] to Swadhar Grehs (shelter homes)”. 

It also noted the absence of a grievance redressal system. Accountability concerns were also raised, as monitoring committee reports were inaccessible.

Mahila Shakti Kendra

In 2017, the Modi government launched the Mahila Shakti Kendra Scheme to empower rural women by raising awareness of government schemes and services available to them. 

It was designed to establish women empowerment bodies at state, district and block levels, facilitating service delivery and imparting awareness. 

But, the scheme failed and the Union government eventually scrapped it.

The NITI Aayog study found that only 13% of people surveyed were aware of the scheme’s existence, although most viewed it as essential.

The study noted the “declining trends in fund allocation” and poor implementation of the scheme.

Most district and block-level bodies were not formed two years after the scheme’s launch. Pointing to critical expertise gaps, NITI Aayog said there was “limited technical understanding of women’s empowerment”.

The study further categorised the scheme’s efficiency as average, pointing out low engagement atblock-level activities under the scheme. 

The Collective found through court files, official records, and interviews, that women’s safety and empowerment schemes, now under the Mission Shakti, continue to suffer from poor awareness, weak implementation, and funding shortfalls.

[This investigation is partially supported by the Appan Menon Memorial Trust Award to The Reporters' Collective.]