Lahore Footbridges Get Panic Buttons For Women, Key Details Missing

LAHORE: Emergency buttons wired to the police control room are being fitted on Lahore’s pedestrian bridges, after women in two neighbourhoods complained of harassment and of men loitering on the crossings.

The Punjab Safe Cities Authority says installation has begun on the directions of Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz. A woman or student who presses the button is connected directly to the Safe City control room and is told to move to a marked safety zone on the bridge while police are sent.

The trigger was a set of complaints from Wafaqi Colony and Mughalpura. According to the authority, its virtual patrolling officers began watching the bridges through cameras, passed what they saw to the local police, and officers reached the women in time.

Footbridges are an obvious weak point. They are narrow, raised above the road, often screened by hoardings and have only two ways out. Thousands of students and working women have no choice but to cross them twice a day.

The technology is not new to the city. A hundred buttons were installed in Lahore when the Virtual Women Police Station opened, and by August last year the authority counted 122 locations in the city and 101 elsewhere in Punjab. Thirty-nine women’s colleges were then added, with 450 promised. In August this year the chief minister announced a further 1,500, and traffic police say more than 40,000 QR-code versions have gone into rickshaws, cabs and buses.

What has not been published is evidence of how well they work. The authority has not said how many bridges will be covered, which ones, or by when. Nor has it released figures on how often existing buttons are pressed, how long police take to arrive or how many alerts ended in an arrest.

Opinion is divided. Managing Director Ahsan Younas has said on Sunday that the buttons have worked in Lahore for eight years and that 2,200 were added in the last two. In the same report, a journalist in Peshawar, where 68 similar “pink buttons” were recently installed, said they had done little to improve security in Lahore.

In a video released by the authority, female students welcomed the bridge buttons and spoke of wanting help within reach on their daily commute. Their relief is understandable in a city still shaken by the gang rape of an Azerbaijani woman in DHA last month, whose survivor has refused to leave Pakistan without justice.

International experience counsels modesty about gadgets. UN Women, which has worked with cities on safe public spaces for more than a decade, has long argued that alarms help only alongside good lighting, open sightlines and responders who are trained to believe the caller.

Women who cannot reach a button can call 15 and press 2 for the Virtual Women Police Station. The authority could settle the argument about effectiveness by publishing the list of bridges and a monthly count of alerts and response times.