Mumbai: Central Railway launches 'Smart Sahelees' scheme to ensure women's safety

Commuters, RPF personnel inaugurate the initiative on Tuesday

In a move to make daily commuting for women safer, Central Railway has come up with a scheme that would involve volunteers, Railway Protection Force (RPF) officers and a live monitoring of minute-to-minute complaints for immediate redressal.

The service has been named ‘Smart Sahelee' where SMART stands for Suburban Mumbai Assertive Rail Travellers. CR on Tuesday said it will create WhatsApp groups for its 1,774 local train trips, and each group will have four daily women commuters as volunteers and a dedicated RPF officer as its members. These will be connected to a central monitoring system at the headquarters.

As per the statistics, CR's suburban services ferry around 4.5 million passengers daily 30 per cent or approximately 13.5 lakh of them are women. "The holistic security net covering all 1,774 suburban services eventually aims to achieve zero crime against women and establish a two-way communication with women commuters," RPF Senior Divisional Commissioner K K Ashraf said.

Ashraf said the group including the volunteers would be called ‘Service Sahelee'. And, 31 Service Sahelees would form one Sector Sahelee. To cover all 1,774 local services, there are 59 sector groups. Each Sector Sahelee will form one WhatsApp group with 127 members - 124 volunteers [four each from 31 Service Sahelees], woman RPF officer as Force Mentor, a woman constable as Assistant Mentor and Passenger Mentor. A woman volunteer preferably a representative of an NGO Railway users consultative committees will be the Passenger Mentor. At least 25 commuters will also be members of a group.

Ashraf said the volunteers would interact with passengers and take feedback on matters related to women security, and bring it to the notice of the monitoring and response team. They can also post a complaint/SOS for immediate monitoring, he added. Twenty-one stations - Kasara, Titwala, Kalyan, Karjat, Badlapur, Ambarnath, Dombivali, Diwa, Mumbra, Thane, Mulund, Ghatkopar, Kurla, Dadar, Byculla, CSMT, Vadala Road, Mankhurd, Belapur, Thurbe and Panvel will have one woman RPF officer all the time.

CR General Manager Sanjeev Mittal also inaugurated an IP-based video surveillance system at 17 stations, including Lonavala, Amravati. It has video analytics and facial recognition system. The video feeds from CCTV cameras will be stored for 30 days for playback in case of event analysis or for investigation purposes. Live feeds will be displayed on multiple screens at the RPF post at all the 17 CR stations. The video feeds have been brought to a centralised Security Control room at CSMT station.