Nirbhaya funds languish in Centre’s coffers

The indifference of the successive central and state governments is evident from the fact that more than Rs 1,200 crore of the total Rs 3,000 crore corpus allocated for Nirbhaya fund is lying unused.

It’s even more intriguing to know that no State or Union Territory has come up with any proposal for the safety of women in the last couple of years, according to the Ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD), the nodal agency which oversees the progress of schemes under Nirbahaya funds. After the Delhi incident, the then Congress-led UPA government announced a corpus fund of Rs 1,000 crore in the Union budget-2013-14 to set up infrastructure and support initiatives to ensure safety of the women in the country.

After two more budgets – 2014-15 and 2015-16, the corpus has swollen to Rs 3,000 crore under the BJP-led NDA government. By June 2014, not even a single rupee was utilised by the government as the habit of parking of funds over the years- in the name of planning and approval of schemes- still continues under the new NDA regime.

Both the proposals - Ministry of Road Transport & Highways’ “Security for Women in Public Road Transport in the Country” at an estimated cost of Rs 1,405 crore in 32 cities that have a population of 1 million or more, and the Ministry of Home Affairs’ plan to set up an Emergency Response System to attend women in distress with an outlay of Rs 321.69 crore have been approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs long ago. But there was no headway in implementing these two plans.

An amount of Rs 50 crore and Rs 150 crore were provided to Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and Ministry of Home Affairs respectively for their sanctioned projects during the year 2014-15. Of late, the two initiatives proposed by the WCD – “One Stop Centre for Women Affected by Violence” with a total project cost of Rs 18.58 crore and “Scheme for Universalisation of Women Helpline” at an estimated cost of Rs 69.49 crore have also been approved under Nirbhaya Fund for implementation in the current year 2015-16 but still nothing moved.

However, the plan was to set up 640 Nirbhaya Centres or One- Stop Crisis Centres (OSCC) across the country with an outlay of Rs 244.09 crore (Rs 36.98 lakh for each centre) initially, the Centre had reduced it to just 36 recently, one centre per state and Union Territory.