From Kanyakumari to Srinagar: 31-year-old marches for women’s safety, to walk in Mumbai tonight

Srishti Bakshi will take to Mumbai’s streets on Saturday night as part of the #MakeYourCitySafe campaign.

After having travelled across 110 locations across the country in 230 days for women safety, Srishti Bakshi, 31, will take to the streets of the city on Saturday night as part of the #MakeYourCitySafe campaign.

While on her journey, she also met with President Ramnath Kovind and asked him to extend his support in the initiative. (HT FILE)

As a part of her initiative, which is supported by National Commission for Women (NCW), she covered a distance of 3,800 km from Kanyakumari to Srinagar.

While on her journey, she also met with President Ramnath Kovind and asked him to extend his support in the initiative.

She will now be submitting a report of her findings to Ministry of Women and Child Development, which will speak about citizen’s participation in police system, gender sensitization and digital and financial literacy for women empowerment.

“While we travelled across the country, various aspects of culture changed, but domestic violence was experienced by women across the country, only the nature of it changed. For example, in Tamil Nadu, it had to do with dowry, but in Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, it was because of alcoholism,” said Bakshi.

The initiative is to mobilise communities to make the country safer for girls and women.

“Unfortunately, it takes a case as horrific as the Khatau rape case or Nirbhaya’s case to shake people,” said Bakshi.

“However, in these five years, between these two cases, there have been 5,000 acid attacks and 1,75,000 rapes that have been reported. The unreported numbers are naturally higher,” added Bakshi.

She said that her night walk in Mumbai would be about sharing her experience with the people and to invite them to walk 1,000 steps a day for Crossbow miles, so that they could take up various women development initiatives.

“The walk is over, but the cause lives on,” Bakshi said.

Nandita Shah, co-director, Akshara centre, said that changes in women safety were necessary to be taken up on various levels – individual as well as government level.

“Inequality is something that is already learnt, but in our society, equality needs be learnt. For which, we need to change the mindset of children and teach our sons to respect women,” Shah said.