Delhi Police: Delhi: बलात्कार रोकने के लिए शुरु किए दिल्ली पुलिस के दो साल पुराने कार्यक्रम 'परिवर्तन' का क्या हुआ? police initiatives Parivartan,

NEW DELHI: Perhaps, if a Delhi Police programme launched in 2005 to prevent rapes had worked as it was intended, the sexual assault on the 23-year-old woman who died last week might not have happened. Seven years ago, the Delhi Police, responding to two sickening rapes on the streets of the Capital that stirred the public, launched a programme called Parivartan (Hindi for 'change') to prevent violence against women. As police initiatives went, Parivartan, which aimed to reduce the incidence of rape by 25% each year, was more refined than the usual crackdown on miscreants. Correctly identifying rape as a social problem, Parivartan had taken a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, it sought to make the police force more sensitive towards violence against women. On the other, it reached out to communities, seeking to challenge the social reasons for such attacks. Parivartan made a promising start, using pantomimes and workshops to create awareness in schools, localities and police stations, sending women cops to patrol neighbourhoods and encouraging women to form a monitoring system in their locality. The cop who started Parivartan, Sagar Preet Hooda, says the number of rape cases in the districts covered by the programme fell every year between 2006 and 2010. However, in 2010, with the programme having expanded from one district of the capital to three (of a total of 11 districts), Parivartan petered out after Hooda moved to a new role. According to Sudhir Yadav, special commissioner of police, traffic, and the person in charge of the women's safety helpline, Parivartan has been scaled up and is currently running in nine districts. However, numbers on each of the programme's specific initiatives and accounts of several people running them belie his claim that the programme is working better than ever. "It (Parivartan) was not institutionalised," says Rajat Mitra, a clinical psychologist with a specialisation in sexual crimes who worked on Parivartan. "It was a fantastic effort, but it ran into problems like budgetary constraints - all five years, it was run with minimal resources. It was not supported by the top brass who kept directing police energies elsewhere." The Programme Parivartan was launched in the backdrop of a steep rise in rape incidents in the Capital - according to Delhi Police data, from 381 cases in 2001 to 658 by 2005. About 29% of these cases were from north-west Delhi. In over 95% of the cases, a person known to the victim was the attacker.