Two young Indian women have come up with a creative way to combat their country’s pervasive rape problem: a pair of high-tech jeans.
Students Diksha Pathak, 21, and Anjali Srivastava, 23, of Varanasi designed a pair of red pants outfitted with a small electronic button that sends a distress call to the nearest police station when pressed. The signal acts as a tracker, so police can rush straight to the victim’s location.
There are already as many as 200 police stations capable of receiving the alarm in Varanasi and its surrounding areas. Tests will be carried out next month, and lawmakers may press for the technology to be expanded nationwide if they’re successful.
“We have been thinking of making this device for a long time,” Pathak, a science student, told Central European News. “My father is often making himself ill with worry each time I am coming home late.
“These terrible gang rapes of women that we have heard so much about recently shocked me and my colleague to the very core. Hopefully no other women will have to suffer if they are wearing our clothing.”
Pathak joined forces with Srivastava, who is studying electronic communication, to invent the device, which lasts for about three months before the batteries need to be replaced. The anti-rape jeans cost less than 43 cents.
The students’ timing couldn’t be better. Just last week, a UN child’s rights committee charged Indian authorities with not doing enough to fight sexual violence after two teenage sisters were gang-raped and hung from a mango tree in a rural village in Uttar Pradesh.
“There has been a dereliction of duty in relation to rape cases,” said Benyam Mezmur, deputy chairman of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.
Sexual violence in India garnered widespread attention there and abroad after a New Delhi woman was gang-raped and murdered on a moving bus in 2012.
According to Indian government statistics, a rape occurs every 22 minutes in the country.