What actually makes a city safe for a woman to walk through? For decades, the closest thing India had to an answer was crime data — cold, incomplete, and reliant on women coming forward in the first place.
Last year, the government tried something it hadn’t done at a national scale before: measuring the thing crime data can’t capture — how safe women feel, block by block, hour by hour.
The National Commission for Women’s NARI 2025 index, released in August 2025 and described by its developers as India’s first national index of its kind, surveyed 12,770 women across 31 cities on their everyday experience of safety — in their neighbourhoods, on buses, at work, after dark.
The findings have taken on fresh relevance in recent weeks, after a minor was allegedly assaulted aboard a moving bus in the Delhi-NCR region — a case that has reignited a familiar, urgent question: what does it actually take to make a city safe for women?
The good news buried inside the NARI data is that some Indian cities already have a working answer. Here’s what they’re getting right — and what the rest of the country can borrow from them.
1. Kohima shows that community trust can outperform infrastructure
Kohima, a hill town in Nagaland that most of India would struggle to place on a map, topped the NARI index with a safety score of 82.9 percent — the highest in the country, well above the national average of 65 percent.
In Kohima, neighbourhood trust and community policing are proving that safety is about people looking out for one another. Photograph: (TOI)
Researchers credit the win less to hardware and more to something harder to install: active neighbourhood watch groups, community policing, and gender-balanced social practices where safety is treated as everyone’s job, not just the police’s.
It’s a reminder that the most effective safety infrastructure is sometimes social, not physical.
2. Aizawl runs on familiarity, not just force
Aizawl, ranked fourth on the index, follows a similar script to Kohima: strong community networks and a visible, familiar police presence that women say they genuinely trust, even after dark.
High social trust — the sense that neighbours, shopkeepers, and local police will actually step in — does more for a woman’s sense of safety than a patrol car passing by once an hour.
3. The Northeast is running a masterclass
Four of India’s seven safest cities — Kohima, Aizawl, Gangtok, and Itanagar — are in the Northeast, a region that rarely gets credit in conversations about urban India.
Gangtok, ranked fifth with a score of 70.4 percent, stands out for gender-sensitive governance and civic institutions that actually respond when women raise concerns.
Itanagar’s strength is inclusive local governance — women’s collectives and awareness campaigns that are built into how the city runs, not bolted on after a crisis. Together, they suggest a pattern worth studying: cities where women have a real stake in local governance tend to also be the cities where women feel safest in it.
4. Visakhapatnam and Bhubaneswar prove infrastructure and institutions can work together
Rounding out the top three, Visakhapatnam and Bhubaneswar are flagged for strong infrastructure paired with active, responsive policing and thoughtful urban planning.
Aizawl shows how strong community networks and a trusted local police presence can make women feel safer, even after dark. Photograph: (The Tribune)
Neither city relies on one fix alone — well-lit streets and functioning public spaces are paired with institutions that follow through when women report a problem. It’s the combination, more than either piece alone, that seems to move the needle.
5. Mumbai proves scale and safety aren’t automatically at odds
Mumbai, ranking top seven in the survey, is the only major metropolis to make the safest seven, and researchers point to proactive policing, safer late-night public transport, and workplace safety policies as the reasons why.
Mumbai demonstrates how proactive policing, safer public transport and workplace protections can make a difference in a city that never slows down. Photograph: (TOI)
For a city of Mumbai’s density and pace, that’s a meaningful data point: size doesn’t have to be a safety liability if the systemic pieces — transport, policing, workplace protections — are in place together.
6. Representation is doing quiet, heavy lifting
Across nearly every city on the safe list, one pattern recurs: women aren’t just being protected by the system, they’re staffing it. In several Union Territories, women now make up a third of the police force.
Cities that have invested in women bus drivers, women-staffed police stations, and women in local governance consistently report higher trust scores from the women who live there — because representation, it turns out, reads as safety.
7. Feeling safe and being statistically safe aren’t the same thing
Here’s a finding worth sitting with: NCRB’s official crime data ranks Kolkata as one of India’s lowest-crime major cities on paper, yet it doesn’t make NARI’s list of safest cities by women’s own lived experience.
That gap is exactly why perception surveys like NARI exist — a low crime count doesn’t always mean women actually feel free to walk home at night, take the last bus, or file a complaint when something happens. The most useful safety data captures both: what’s reported, and what’s felt.
8. What the rest of India can borrow
None of this is a finished playbook — even the safest cities on this list have real gaps to close. But taken together, the NARI data does offer something rare: a replicable pattern. Community policing that treats residents as partners, not just the police. Visible representation, from bus drivers to beat officers. Civic institutions that respond when women raise concerns, instead of after the fact.
None of it requires a mega-budget or years of infrastructure build-out — it requires treating women’s safety as something a city builds daily, not something it announces after a crisis. The cities getting it right today are proof that it’s possible. The work now is making sure more of India learns from them.
