India’s mandatory GPS rule for mobile phones won’t make women safer

Photo credit: Lawan Baldwin.

In the interest of women’s safety, India’s government has recently announced a couple of new rules. Starting next year, every mobile phone – including feature phones – must include built-in GPS features. Starting in 2018, phones will also need to sport some kind of “panic button,” which will automatically alert authorities when pressed.

To be clear, the intention of these new requirements is honorable: they’re designed to help keep women safer, and it’s also hoped that they’ll make police and security forces more accountable. India has a very serious problem with violence against women, so this is a real problem the government is aiming to address. That’s a good thing.

Unfortunately, it seems unlikely this policy will have the desired effect.

Too high a price

In India’s SECC census last summer, the country found that its citizens were still overwhelmingly rural and remarkably poor – 75 percent of those surveyed earned less than US$78 each month. 28 percent of the country doesn’t own any kind of phone, let alone a mobile phone.

Yes, in an ideal world everyone would have a GPS signal, but not everyone can afford that.

The addition of GPS features, it is estimated, will add at least US$6 to the cost of each phone. Currently, India’s cheapest mobile phones cost around US$7.50, so adding a GPS to these feature phones will nearly double their price.

Realistically, that means fewer people are going to buy them. If the cheapest available mobile rises in cost to US$13.50 because of mandatory GPS features, that’s more than a quarter of most people’s monthly income – and that’s before you factor in any kind of service cost. Those who do buy these GPS-enabled phones may indeed be safer. But the increased cost will lead many of India’s poor women to choose not to buy a mobile phone at all, making them less safe than they would have been if they had a cheaper, no-GPS-enabled mobile.

Photo credit: Trocaire.

There are alternatives

Yes, in an ideal world everyone would have a GPS signal that could give the police pinpoint-accurate location details. But not everyone can afford that right now. It would be better to ensure that everyone at least has a mobile, so that they can attempt to call for help, rather than simply having no phone at all if they are threatened or attacked.

GPS location and panic buttons are treating the symptoms, not the disease

Moreover, the panic button – it needn’t be a dedicated button, it could just be a long press on one of the number keys – could go a long way to supplanting the need for GPS. India should allow mobile firms to sell cheap mobile phones (those that cost under INR 1,500 (US$23)) without GPS features if they include a panic button that automatically initiates a voice call with police that cannot be terminated without entering a code. Women who could afford it would still have access to the GPS-enabled panic button, but those who can’t pay that much would still have phones that might help them in a crisis – they would be able to shout out their location, and the call not terminating might give police the time to triangulate the phone’s location via cell towers and get a pretty accurate location anyway.

It’s also worth pointing out GPS location and panic buttons are treating the symptoms, not the disease. Granted, cultural change takes time, and it’s hard to fault the Indian Communications and Information Technology Ministry for wanting to use every tool at its disposal to combat violence against women. But I think most people would agree that the government could be doing more in other areas to fight this crime problem, including: