The alleged gang rape of a minor at Aastha Kunj Park and a subsequent police encounter near the back gate of Lady Shri Ram College have renewed attention on a familiar but poorly addressed urban problem: the safety of women students does not end at the college boundary. It depends on the roads, bus stops, metro exits, parks, farms, parking areas and poorly watched edges that connect campuses to the rest of the city.
According to a Times of India report, LSR returned to offline classes a day after cancelling regular classes. But accounts from students at other Delhi University colleges show that the wider safety question remains unresolved. The concerns described by students are not limited to one campus or one incident. They include inadequate lighting, harassment on approach roads, unreliable public transport, uneven police presence and uncertainty about whether seeking help will result in support or judgement.
That pattern matters because colleges are often treated as enclosed institutions, while the journeys to and from them are managed by several agencies and private actors. A college may control its gate and immediate premises, but the road outside can fall under a municipal body, a public works agency or another land-owning authority. Bus services, metro stations, parks and police patrols operate through separate systems. For students, however, these administrative boundaries disappear during the journey home.
The accounts in the report show how safety is experienced at street level. A student associated with NCC at Gargi College, near Siri Fort, said there were not enough lights outside the college gate and that reaching campus at about 5am felt uncomfortable. The student also said a PCR vehicle was stationed nearby for a few days after an earlier harassment incident but was no longer visible. The student further alleged that NCC students had been filmed without consent by someone inside a parked truck.
The details point to a gap between temporary reaction and sustained management. A police vehicle appearing for a few days can reassure students immediately after an incident, but its disappearance raises a basic operational question: what determines the duration, location and review of patrol deployment? The supplied report does not establish whether the patrol was formally withdrawn, shifted elsewhere or continued in another form. It does, however, show that students experience visible policing as intermittent rather than predictable.
The journey after classes presents a different set of risks. A student at Bhagini Nivedita College in Najafgarh said she generally felt safe when classes ended around 5pm, but described late DTC buses and instances in which drivers did not stop. The student said standing at a bus stop after dark felt unsafe, particularly because farms were located nearby. In this case, the issue is not simply the condition of the college entrance. It is the relationship between class timings, bus frequency, the surrounding land use and the availability of people and services after dark.
For students at Kamala Nehru College near Siri Fort, the risk can continue through the public transport network. One student recounted that her roommate was returning to her paying guest accommodation at around 9.30pm when, while coming up an escalator at Green Park metro station, she encountered a man who appeared intoxicated and allegedly exposed himself and made obscene gestures. She left the escalator and looked for another route out of the station.
This account illustrates why a station cannot be assessed only through its platforms, ticketing areas or formal security arrangements. Escalators, footpaths, exit corridors and the approaches between a station and a residence can become vulnerable points. A student’s perception of safety is shaped by the entire route, including whether there are alternative exits, visible staff, active surveillance and other people nearby.
The contrast with the route from Karol Bagh metro station to another college is equally instructive. A student said that route felt safe because food stalls and other people created activity, while police vans were often visible. The student had not experienced misbehaviour or harassment there, although parents still asked for updates when delays occurred. The account suggests that safety is also influenced by ordinary urban presence: occupied streets, active commerce, dependable transport and the confidence that help is available.
Yet visibility alone does not guarantee trust. A former student of Indraprastha College for Women told the report that patrolling increased after students faced sexual harassment at an annual fest. She said the constant police presence outside the campus did not make students feel comfortable and that, when someone made a comment about her friend’s dress, nobody intervened. She also said that when students approached the police for help, they felt judged rather than assisted.
This is a critical distinction in the public-safety system. Students need more than patrol vehicles positioned outside a gate. They need an accessible response when harassment occurs, confidence that complaints will be received without judgement and clarity about where responsibility lies. The report does not provide official data on complaints, response times, lighting audits or patrol schedules, so it cannot establish how widespread each problem is. But the consistency of the concerns across different locations shows why a single security intervention is unlikely to resolve the problem.
The locations mentioned in the report also reveal the fragmented geography of student mobility in Delhi. Siri Fort, Najafgarh, Green Park, Karol Bagh and Civil Lines represent different combinations of land use, transport access and street activity. Some routes are active and commercially occupied. Others pass through farms, parks or less populated edges. Some journeys depend on metro stations; others depend on buses that may be delayed or may not stop. A common campus-security template cannot account for all these conditions.
The institutional challenge is therefore one of coordination. College administrations can communicate class schedules and emergency contacts, but they cannot independently fix a dark approach road, guarantee a bus stop’s service or control every public-space edge. Police authorities can increase patrols, but patrols must be linked to a clear assessment of risk rather than deployed only after an incident. Transport agencies can improve service reliability, while civic and land-owning authorities may be responsible for lighting and maintenance. The students’ accounts show what happens when these responsibilities are experienced as disconnected.
The report also raises the question of whether safety planning is sufficiently aligned with the actual time patterns of women students. A campus may be busy during the main teaching day but nearly empty at 5am or after 9pm. Early-morning NCC activities, late travel to paying guest accommodation and delays in public transport create different exposure periods. Safety audits that examine only the campus interior or the formal gate cannot capture these conditions.
There is no single number in the supplied report that can measure the scale of the problem across Delhi University. Nor does it include an official response from the colleges, Delhi Police, Delhi Transport Corporation or Delhi Metro on the specific concerns described. That absence limits what can be concluded about corrective action. What the evidence does establish is a gap between the way institutions define their physical boundaries and the way students experience risk.
The safer route described by the Karol Bagh student offers a useful comparison without proving a universal rule. Food stalls, pedestrians and visible police vehicles may contribute to a sense of security, but the account does not show whether these conditions are consistently present or whether they prevent crime. Similarly, the presence of a police car near a college may reassure some students while making others uncomfortable. Safety infrastructure must therefore be judged not only by its visibility but also by whether students can access help and trust the response.
The central urban question is straightforward: who is responsible for the few hundred metres between a college gate and a student’s next safe point? In practice, that distance may involve a road, a bus stop, a metro station, an escalator, a park edge and a residential lane. Each may be governed differently, but the student experiences them as one continuous route.
The reported incidents and student accounts do not establish that every road outside a women’s college is unsafe. They do show that campus security cannot be separated from last-mile mobility, lighting, street activity, transit operations and institutional trust. The next meaningful step would be for the relevant authorities and colleges to clarify how these routes are assessed, how patrols and transport services are monitored, and how students’ complaints are handled after the immediate attention surrounding an incident fades.
