It was an ordinary school morning in Bangalore. Priya Varadarajan, founder of Durga and the I’m Every Woman Trust, was dropping her daughters, then about four and seven years old, to school. As a school bus rolled by, full of boys, the girls quietly looked down at her feet.
When Priya asked why, the answer stopped her cold.
“Our teacher has told us that when the boys bus comes, you just look down because unnecessarily they will say things or do things that will not be good for you.”
A four-year-old had already been taught to shrink, not because she had done anything wrong but because someone else couldn’t be trusted to behave. For Priya, it was the moment everything became clear. “That was my penny drop moment,” she says, “to say that as a four-year-old, five-year-old, it is so normal for you to lose your space.”
That moment in 2010 became the seed of Durga, a Bangalore-based initiative working to make public spaces safer, not by teaching women to protect themselves but by building a culture of community action around them.
A Feminist Politics Rooted in Personal Experience
Priya Varadarajan is a Chartered Accountant by qualification, an activist by conviction and the founder of Durga, an initiative under the I’m Every Woman Trust. Her path to this work was not straight, but it was consistent.
She grew up understanding that caste, class and gender do not operate in separate lanes. “They are not in different parallels but they are all integrated and work together when it starts to affect people,” she told The Logical Indian.
Her earliest experiences of public harassment go back to her school days in Bangalore, clinging to her bag on local buses so no one would grope her. She began writing about it on a typewriter at home because that was the only outlet she had.
She dropped out of college after her institution enforced a separate staircase for boys and girls, with the reason given being that mixing leads to “unnecessary relationships.” Her mother, a professor, supported the decision and they figured out another way forward.
She went on to do her CA, not because she was passionate about it but because someone had told her that women don’t need to complete professional degrees and that even if they start a course like chartered accountancy, they don’t really need to finish it. She cleared it in the first attempt. “I actually cleared it in the first attempt just to spite someone,” she says plainly. “Women can be great at math and numbers if we just want to.”
The Tool: Theatre of the Oppressed
Around 2010, Priya enrolled in a program on Theatre of the Oppressed, a method where people with lived problems use theatre to solve those problems themselves. It became the core of everything she would do next.
The logic was simple but powerful. Gender-based violence is experienced in the body, yet most responses to it are cerebral: awareness campaigns, legal education, policy debates. Theatre, by contrast, makes the body the site of resolution.
“You’re now using the same body which otherwise is so strong to now expand and express,” she explains. “Usually addressing sexual violence or gender-based violence is very cerebral while the experience has been very bodily.”
Durga works largely with women from the informal sector: construction workers, street vendors, sanitation workers, women who are often too shy to say their own name in a room full of strangers. Through theatre games, they learn to occupy space, feel comfortable in their own surroundings and act when something is wrong.
One story Priya tells captures the spirit of this work well. A woman who cleaned a park had once experienced a man masturbating in her presence at four in the morning. She felt paralysed and did not know how to respond. After the sessions, she said she realised it was his shame, not hers. So the next time something like this happened, she simply stood her ground and started laughing out loud. The man ran away quickly. There was no violence, no confrontation and no fleeing the space.
From Participants to First Responders
Durga’s work does not stop at self-empowerment. Over time, the organisation began to see that the same women who occupied public spaces for their work, sweeping streets and selling goods, were also the people best placed to intervene when something went wrong, precisely because they knew their spaces and were already there.
So Durga began training the very people who already occupied those spaces to become active bystanders.. Today, the organisation has trained over 15,000 active bystanders across various public spaces in Karnataka. A large number of them are men: bus drivers, conductors, auto drivers, security guards, traffic police. The approach is deliberately anti-carceral, built not around policing or surveillance but around community allyship.
Working with men, Priya says, means not walking in as the person who knows better. “You can’t go and tell them, see, I know better than you, I’m going to sit there and train you because you’re also bringing class and caste divide,” she told The Logical Indian. “Why is it the burden of a person who’s a marginalized caste, even if he’s a man, to take on the responsibility of a dominant caste woman?”
Durga’s sessions at BMTC bus depots in Bangalore run over four months, happening inside the bus, during work hours, in the language and context of the drivers and conductors. The curriculum moves from gender and stereotypes to power, harassment, active bystander behaviour and finally to how to actually intervene.
The results are measurable. Between baseline and end-of-programme assessments, a clear shift happens. Responses that begin as “women should be more careful” gradually shift to “as a safety champion, I can intervene, call others, reach out to the driver, or speak up myself.” As Priya puts it, “That’s how we see the real shift in their behaviors.”
The Panic Alarm That Became Policy
In 2013, shortly after the Nirbhaya case brought public space safety to national attention, Durga conducted a survey of about 250 women asking what makes public spaces safe for them. The answer was not more CCTVs or more police but more women in public spaces.
A follow-up survey identified public transport as the most unsafe space, with about 90 percent of women saying they feared buses at certain hours and nearly 70 percent saying they had been violated on public transport. Data from the Indian Institute of Science corroborated this, placing the figure at around 69 to 70 percent of women who had felt unsafe in Bangalore’s BMTC buses.
Durga partnered with engineering students to design a panic alarm, a small device placed above the driver’s seat with switches distributed around the bus. Passengers who experienced or witnessed sexual violence could press a switch to alert others. The pilot saw the alarm pressed eleven times and all eleven times the perpetrator was made to leave the bus, with no violence in any instance.
The pilot also helped Durga understand why bystanders don’t act. The top reasons were that people don’t realise something is happening, they don’t think it is their responsibility and even when they do, they don’t know what to do or fear the consequences of stepping in. The panic alarm addressed the first barrier directly by telling bystanders that something was wrong and that a response was needed. Priya draws an analogy: “You draw a parallel of it with a road accident. Why do you take action? Because now you’ve seen that it’s a problem, someone’s bleeding. I know nobody needs to explain to me that there is a problem.”
In 2019, the Central Government mandated that every new bus manufactured in India must come with a built-in panic alarm. Ten cities adopted the system and nearly a thousand crores of Nirbhaya funds were allocated for CCTVs integrated with these alarms. But the money was never used to tell people the alarm existed, what it was for or how to use it. Durga is now working to fix that gap.
On Self-Defence and Structural Change
Priya is direct about one thing: she does not believe safety in public spaces should be a woman’s responsibility to secure for herself. It is her right to simply exist in those spaces without having to prepare, defend or protect herself from harm she did not invite. “It’s my right to feel safe.”
There is a larger principle behind this. “Sexual violence is a very personal thing, but it’s a structural inequity,” she says. “Therefore, there’s no point in solving it at the personal level. It needs to get solved at the structural level.”
This is why Durga works with the transport department, with traffic police, with universities and with government institutions. The goal is not to give individuals better tools to survive a broken system but to repair the system itself.
VOICE: The Work With Colleges
One of Durga’s programmes, called VOICE, works with college students on campus safety and active citizenship. Students are encouraged to ask questions, push for changes in their institutions and understand leadership through feminist principles.
“We want to see how we can actually integrate inclusion into the part of the regular curriculum in the university so that no matter what you study, you don’t need to be a humanities student to study this,” she says. “You should study it because you’re a human being.”
Looking Ahead
Durga currently operates in Bangalore, with expanding work in Kolar and Mysore. Delhi is the city Priya most wants to reach, particularly to work with its transport systems and licensing processes, though she is clear that such an expansion would need local partners and deep contextualisation. “Language plays a very critical role in all forms of behavior,” she says. “You can share the design, but then you would have to contextualize it.”
She is also in the middle of a detailed evaluation of the panic alarm as a trigger for bystander action, work she calls her biggest source of excitement for the next couple of years.
When asked if Durga has cracked the problem, she answers without hesitation. “We have also not cracked it. We are still struggling on an everyday basis to get people to understand it, but also for us to learn because it’s also people centric. No 2 people are the same, even if they are from the same background. There’s a lot of learning. There’s a long way to go, actually, a really long way.”
Real change, Priya knows, is not a campaign. It is slow, messy and deeply human.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
At its core, Durga’s work challenges the idea that safety is an individual burden. It reframes public safety as a shared, community-led responsibility rooted in everyday action.
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