Where Are the Girls? A Short Film from Ajmer Puts Women’s Urban Mobility Under the Lens
Bharatmorning.com – Walk through any Indian city at dusk and a pattern emerges quickly: the streets fill with men, with families, with commerce, but the young women who should be part of that public fabric seem to vanish. They are not absent from the population—women constitute roughly half of India’s citizens—yet their physical presence in parks, bus stops, tea stalls, and market lanes is conspicuously thin. The gap between demographic reality and street-level visibility is not a statistical curiosity. It is a signal that something structural is keeping half the population indoors.
In Ajmer, a city defined by the dargah of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, the waters of Ana Sagar, and a Brahma temple, three young women decided to turn that question into a camera. The result is a roughly six-minute short film titled Ajmer ki ladkiyan kahan hai—literally, “Where are the girls of Ajmer?”—that interrogates whether a city can claim to belong to its residents when half of them cannot move through it without fear.
Three Women, One Camera, and the Streets That Stared Back
Santra Chaurathiya, Renu Chaudhary, and Nameera Pathan picked up a camera and walked the alleys, lanes, and hidden corners of their own city looking for young women willing to speak on record. The act of filming itself became an assertion of presence.
“Just picking up a camera and exploring the streets and the nooks and crannies of their city looking for young women to interview became a way to reclaim the city,” said Nameera.
Shopkeepers questioned them. Passersby stared. None of it stopped the project. What emerged from those conversations was a portrait of daily navigation shaped by anxiety: which bus route to take, what hour to leave home, how to avoid being the sole woman on a crowded vehicle.
The Commute as a Security Operation
The women interviewed in the film describe schools and colleges where they feel relatively safe, followed by the moment they step outside and the calculus begins. Men leer, brush past, or make unwanted contact on buses. In narrow lanes, clusters of men gather to drink, occupying space that might otherwise be shared.
“We go to schools, colleges, tuition, jobs, markets, our friends’ homes,” one interviewed girl told the filmmakers. “But everywhere there is a sense of foreboding: Which route to take, what time to go, how to ensure that you’re not the only girl on the bus you board.”
A trip that should be a simple matter of covering distance becomes, in practice, a continuous exercise in vigilance—constantly scanning, adjusting, and rearranging plans the instant something feels off. Families, acting out of genuine fear, codify that vigilance into household rules: do not stay out late, do not take that particular road, do not linger with that particular boy.
“We are brought up to believe that girls ought to have restrictions,” said Sylvester Ariel of the Mahila Jan Adhikar Samiti.
One Girl Who Broke the Rule
The film also follows Sangeeta, a delivery gig worker in Ajmer—an uncommon sight in a city where women’s economic participation outside the home remains tightly bounded. Her family was stunned when she took the job, questioning whether it was even a legitimate occupation. Customers still ask why she is out delivering a parcel late in the evening.
“But I will keep doing this because I love my work,” she said.
Her persistence has had a ripple effect: two additional women have since taken up delivery-agent roles in the city, suggesting that visibility itself can shift what a community considers possible.
From Fellowship to Screen
The project originated during a fellowship under Cities for Youth, a programme administered by Safetipin, a social-impact organisation focused on building safer and more equitable urban environments. The finished film was screened at Shaping our Cities, a two-day summit held in New Delhi on August 26 and 27, where it framed mobility not as a convenience but as a precondition for daily life.
Transport Policy and the Missing Journey
The film’s central argument extends beyond Ajmer. Without safe, affordable transportation, women cannot leave home to seek employment. Girls drop out of secondary school when the distance between home and campus exceeds what a family deems walkable, and no reliable transit exists to bridge the gap.
States including Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, and Karnataka have introduced free bus rides for women, a policy shift that has measurably changed behaviour. Families who previously balked at the fare—or at the perceived risk of a paid ride—are now more willing to let daughters commute to work, access medical care, or enrol in colleges farther from home. Ridership among women has risen accordingly.
Yet the gains are incomplete. Overcrowding on vehicles, gaps in last-mile connectivity, and persistent safety concerns at stops and along walking routes remain unresolved. A bus that is safe inside does not make the unlit stretch of pavement to reach it equally safe.
“When policy focuses only on assets and ride metrics rather than journeys, it can make individual parts safer while leaving the overall experience uncertain,” writes Sonal Jaitley, an associate with MicroSave Consulting, in Hindustan Times. “When women can travel safely, they gain access to more than destinations.”
The distinction matters. Counting buses deployed or kilometres of track built measures infrastructure, not lived experience. A woman’s journey is a sequence—home to stop, stop to vehicle, vehicle to destination, destination back home—and each link must hold before the chain functions. Until policy treats the entire sequence as the unit of analysis, the question posed by three young women with a camera in Ajmer will keep returning, city after city, evening after evening: where are the girls, and why are they not where they should be?
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