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. 

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........

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