Editorial: For Singappen to be successful

For Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay, setting up a special police force to respond to crimes against women is the easy part of fulfilling a promise he made to voters during his election campaign. The more crucial part is to provision it well in the months and years ahead and keep it going in the face of any practical difficulties that might arise. The force will operate under the supervision of the Chief Minister himself; so, its success will depend to a large extent on the intensity and persistence of his guidance.

The Singappen Special Task Force has been allocated a budget of Rs 354 crore in the first phase. Staffing will be scaled up to 2,500 dedicated personnel in the second. Understandably, the initial phases will be all about the buildout: staffing, operating protocols, equipment acquisition (navy blue and khaki uniforms, body-worn cameras, specialised patrol vehicles and surveillance drones) and registering visibility in the public eye. Being tangible goals, these are achievable in the near term.

Longer-term goals, such as making public as well as private spaces safe for women and ending systemic gender-based violence, will require a vastly greater and more sustained effort by the entire police force, within which Singappen is but one cog. Therefore, much will depend on how well this special force is integrated into the broader law-enforcement machinery and how much it is backed up with investigative, forensic, legal and counselling capabilities. If not, Singappen will remain a patrol force with attractive uniforms but no lasting impact on gender-based violence at large.

To start with, this force’s main tasks will be to respond rapidly to distress calls, take up preventive surveillance at high-risk locations like railway stations, bus stands, IT hubs, and educational institutions, and intervene in online crimes like digital stalking and harassment.  By deploying such a force on the ground, the existing all-women police stations will be freed to concentrate on crime investigation and legal process.

Although Tamil Nadu in the 1990s was a pioneer in establishing a statewide network dedicated to dealing with violence against women, the Singappen initiative follows the recent Indian trend of shifting to proactive and tech-driven prevention of street harassment. Telangana's SHE Teams kicked off this trend in 2014 by deploying small units at crime hotspots equipped with hidden cameras to catch stalkers and harassers red-handed. The model has been adopted by several states since then. To fine-tune Singappen’s efficiency, it would be useful to study the impact of those precedents.

Broadly, gender-responsive policing has increased reporting of crimes and improved women’s access to help. However, increased reporting does not always translate into higher conviction rates and better perception of safety. Only when combined with victim support services and professional investigation does it lead to better outcomes. Moreover, all such initiatives in India have run into implementation gaps, such as understaffing, inadequate training, and insufficient budgets, and those two ancient and systemic afflictions, patriarchal norms and the lack of buy‑in by the police establishment at large.

Another lacuna is the lack of monitoring. Only the Telangana SHE initiative has reported stats since its inception, claiming a 20% drop in crimes against women in Hyderabad, for instance. Other states have not bothered to measure their impact at all, reducing their all-women special forces to mere patrol units. Singappen needs to look out for all these pitfalls to achieve its true purpose.