Ishika Ray Chaudhuri2025-10-072025-05-02https://dans.nls.ac.in/handle/123456789/2452This dissertation explores how narratives of women’s safety in Delhi are constructed and operationalised through the frameworks of neoliberal urbanism and surveillance technology. The research examines how contemporary policy initiative - particularly the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) and Delhi’s Master Plans - reinforce a paternalistic and technocratic approach to safety that centres surveillance over inclusivity. The central thesis argues that the discourse on women’s safety is weaponised to justify the expansion of surveillance infrastructures, such as CCTV cameras and Integrated Command and Control Centres (ICCCs), creating a “surveillant assemblage” that disciplines public spaces without addressing the structural causes of insecurity. This assemblage disproportionately targets marginalised communities and reinforces existing caste and class inequalities, while offering little substantive safety to women - especially those outside the dominant socio-economic categories. The study employs a constructivist, qualitative methodology. It triangulates data from three key sources: critical analysis of urban policy documents, feminist and post-colonial urban theory, and semi-structured interviews with 20 women from diverse caste, class, and religious backgrounds who actively navigate Delhi’s public spaces. Through this method, the research juxtaposes top-down policy narratives with bottom-up lived experiences. The findings reveal a significant dissonance between policy rhetoric and the realities of urban life for women. While policy documents frame safety as a problem solvable through surveillance and urban aesthetics, interviewees highlight a complex terrain shaped by fear, gendered mobility, class disparity, and infrastructural exclusion. Surveillance often exacerbates feelings of unsafety by enabling social control rather than promoting real security. The dissertation concludes that Delhi’s current urban safety paradigm is inadequate and exclusionary. It recommends a radical reimagining of safety that prioritises accessibility, intersectional justice, and the right to loiter. True safety, the research contends, emerges not from watching women, but from cantering their voices in urban design and policy, challenging the surveillance-first ethos of smart city governance.enThesis