Everything was a failure that day,” says Jyoti’s companion on that fateful ride. From the taxi drivers who ignored the rules to the police “not working properly,” to the hospital facilities, which were “very poor”, to the indifference of the passers-by. In her last blog in the series on the rape incident that occurred last year in December in India, Dr. Kanchana Lanzet tries to capture the plight of the average Indian citizen.

What happened to 23-year-old Jyothi, Nirbhaya or Damini as people know her, was a snowballing of attitudes and hackneyed traditional modes of thinking. In her next blog in the series, Dr. Kanchana Lanzet talks about how Indian society is having a tough time deciding whether to be modern or to be western. Indian women are also partly unwilling to give up the comforts of tradition- of having the security and protection of the Indian family.

Why does violence against women happen in the first place? Can one hold social and economic backwardness responsible? And what role does one’s upbringing play in creating the ‘Indian male?’ In her third blog in the series, Dr. Kanchana Lanzet speaks about how the male identity changes when a person migrates from his village to a big city like New Delhi.

The Indian government has announced the ‘Nirbhaya’ fund to improve security for women in the country. The fund was announced following the brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old who succumbed to her wounds. The media refer to this woman as ‘Nirbhaya,’ meaning fearless in Hindi. But is the fund merely eyewash to pacify the seething masses or will it really help in promoting women’s safety? Blogger Vishwadeepak is skeptical.

In the second blog in the series, Dr. Kanchana Lanzet of UN Women discusses the role of caste in promoting bias against women. According to the caste system, women, by nature of their biological processes, are “impure.”

For women in India to walk with dignity and freedom, a social transformation as well as a change in the values, attitudes and male perceptions of women, by men and women, is needed. Dr. Kanchana Lanzet, member of the board of directors at UN Women in Bonn, gives us an expert opinion on why being a woman in India is so problematic and whether one can really do much about it. This is Dr. Lanzet’s first blog in the series.