As India celebrates 80 years of independence, the article asks who truly owns the city after dark.
It argues that night-time economy plans in places like Delhi and Hyderabad focus on commerce, while women’s mobility remains constrained by fear, poor infrastructure and social norms.
Without an access-oriented approach, women are excluded from jobs, leisure and public life at night.
As India marks its 80th Independence Day, it is worth asking a simple urban question: who is free to use the city after dark?
Indian cities are being imagined beyond conventional working hours. Delhi’s 2022-23 Budget proposed food trucks operating from 8 pm to 2 am to strengthen the city’s night-time economy and create employment. More recently, Hyderabad’s proposed night-time economy policy has drawn attention for designated zones, integrated late-night transport, improved lighting, pedestrian-friendly infrastructure and a dedicated authority to coordinate the city after dark.
But a night-time economy cannot be judged only by how late shops, restaurants or entertainment spaces remain open. It must also be judged by who can access them safely and freely. If women cannot walk, wait, work, commute or loiter after dark without fear, the city’s night-time economy will remain socially unequal, even if it grows commercially.
The policy gap is not simply that Indian cities are unsafe at night. That is already known. The deeper gap is that urban policy often treats the night as an extension of daytime commerce, while treating women’s mobility as a matter of protection. What cities need instead is an access framework: one that asks whether women can complete the full journey from home to street, street to transport, transport to workplace or leisure space, and back home again.
Freedom is often discussed through rights, law and citizenship. But in everyday life, freedom also has a geography: the ability to return from work, wait for transport, take a night bus, sit in a public place or simply loiter without fear. In Indian cities, this freedom is sharply gendered.
One summer night in Bhopal, around 2 am, I decided to walk home from work with two friends. What I saw on those quiet roads did not prove why women were absent. But it showed who appears in public space after dark, who disappears, and what systems make that disappearance seem normal.
Bhopal is not Delhi, Mumbai or Bengaluru. Unlike India’s larger metropolises, it remains a quieter state capital, culturally and demographically closer to average urban India.
That night, the streets felt like a theatre of men across generations: boys, young men, middle-aged men and older men. Not a single woman crossed our path. We saw men shouting in groups, staggering after drink, rushing recklessly on bikes, walking casually in the middle of the road, and moving carefully to mask their intoxication. A boy stopped us only to ask for a lighter.
At one point, we passed a damaged car, its hazard lights still blinking in the dark. A man in his forties stood beside it, nodding vaguely when we asked if he was all right. He seemed to have called relatives, not the police. In that hesitation lay another truth of the night: fear and avoidance often replace accountability on Indian roads.
What stayed with me was not only the presence of men, but the absence of women. As a man walking that night, I was witnessing a privilege: moving through the city without constantly calculating risk, reputation, transport, safety and possible violence.
A 2019 report by the Ola Mobility Institute found that only 9 per cent of women felt public transport was “very safe”. NCRB’s Crime in India 2024 data recorded 4,41,534 registered cases of crimes against women nationally, or about 1,210 cases a day. Rahul Goel’s analysis of India’s 2019 Time Use Survey found that, among urban residents, 53 per cent of females did not report going outside the home on the survey day, compared with only 14 per cent of males.
Together, these figures reveal a mobility deficit. Women’s movement is restricted not only by violence, but also by unreliable transport, poor lighting, weak enforcement, social judgement, unsafe last-mile links and the anticipation of harm. The result is lost time, lost work, lost education, lost leisure and lost public life.
This is the economic mechanism cities often overlook. If a woman cannot safely commute early in the morning or late at night, her real set of job choices shrinks. If she must spend more on safer transport, negotiate with family before travelling, avoid certain routes, or reject late shifts because the return journey is uncertain, then labour-market access becomes unequal before she reaches the workplace. The city produces a gendered cost of mobility.
This matters as urban economies expand into the night. Nurses, domestic workers, sanitation workers, hospitality workers, care workers, transport workers, delivery workers and students all depend on mobility outside standard office hours. The city’s economy does not stop at sunset. But women’s access to that economy remains conditional.
India’s night-time economy debate is often framed around growth: extended business hours, food trucks, entertainment zones, tourism, employment and urban competitiveness. But if night-time planning is driven mainly by consumption, it risks producing islands of late-night activity rather than inclusive public life.
A more serious night-time economy has to ask who the night is being planned for. Is it only for malls, bars, food streets and commercial districts? Or is it also for women workers returning from shifts, students leaving libraries, street vendors, nurses, sanitation workers, older women, migrants and those who cannot afford private vehicles?
The answer depends on the full night-time access chain. A woman’s mobility after dark is shaped by the street outside her home, the walk to the bus stop, the waiting space, transport frequency, last-mile cost, clean toilets, police behaviour, destination safety and the reliability of the return journey. A failure at any one point can make the whole journey impossible.
This is why familiar recommendations are not enough when they appear as isolated measures. Lighting without footpaths is inadequate. Public transport that stops far from home does not solve last-mile risk. Police presence without trust can become another source of anxiety. Helplines do not replace everyday safety in streets, vehicles and waiting areas.
A night-time economy also has environmental and infrastructural costs. More activity after dark can mean greater energy use, higher lighting demand, more traffic, more waste, and greater pressure on policing and public transport. These costs cannot be ignored. The answer is to design the night-time city better — with efficient lighting, safer pedestrian routes, cleaner public facilities, mixed-use spaces and services planned for access, not only commerce.
Urban policy often responds to women’s safety through protection: patrols, surveillance, helplines and advisories. These may help, but they are not enough. Protection asks how women can be guarded in public space. Access asks whether the city is organised so that women can use public space as ordinary citizens.
Cities should therefore develop night-time mobility and access plans, not only night-time business policies. Such plans should map women’s travel routes after dark, identify unsafe waiting points, audit lighting and footpaths, keep clean public toilets open at night, coordinate buses, autos and last-mile transport, and track harassment complaints by time and location. They should include women workers, students, street vendors, transport workers, informal workers and migrant workers in planning consultations.
Night-time mobility cuts across transport departments, police, urban local bodies, electricity agencies, labour departments, markets, employers and residents’ associations. Without coordination, cities produce fragmented fixes: one agency lights a street, another regulates shops, another controls buses, while women still cannot complete the journey safely.
The point is not to create a city that never sleeps for consumption alone. The point is to create a city where the right to move, work, rest, socialise and return home is not divided by gender.
As Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade argued in Why Loiter?, equality is not achieved when women are merely “allowed” into public space for work or necessity. It is achieved when they can inhabit it freely — to linger, wander, pause and loiter.
The midnight walk in Bhopal was not a survey. It was a starting point. It made visible a question that cities need to answer with data, planning and institutional design: why does the night appear so male, and what would have to change for women to belong to it equally?
As India marks its 80th Independence Day, we should ask what freedom means in its cities. It cannot only mean constitutional rights on paper or economic growth in aggregate. It must also mean the everyday freedom to walk, wait, work, return, wander and loiter after dark without fear.
Until women can belong to the night, Indian cities will remain only partially free.
Views are personal. No external funding was received for this article.
Madhusudan Nag is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Economic Development, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru. His work focuses on migration, labour, cities, caste and inequality. He tweets at @MSnag_writes on X.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth