How safe do women in Kolkata feel?

On a cloudy gloomy Friday morning of June 27, Kolkata woke up to the horror of another rape and the arrest of three youths for their involvement in the crime.

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As the monsoon clouds cleared by the afternoon, more details of the crime emerged. What shook the residents of the metropolis was that the assault was carried out within the protected walls of the West Bengal government-run South Calcutta Law College.For the city still coming to terms with the rape and murder of a postgraduate trainee doctor inside the State-run R.G. Kar Hospital and Medical College on August 9, 2024, another Friday, the allegations of gang rape inside an educational institution only 11 km south of the medical college, in an upscale south Kolkata neighbourhood, came as nothing short of a nightmare.

Over the past 10 months, the city and its people have spent many sleepless nights converging on the streets and raising their voices demanding the safety of women in public places. Unlike the large campus of R.G. Kar MCH, which attracts thousands of patients and hundreds of doctors every day, the ‘new campus’ of the South Calcutta Law College stands eight storeys tall in Kasba on Rashbehari Avenue, an arterial east-west connector of the city.