Activists immediately dismissed the measures as “tokenism”.
“The government clearly felt they had to do something but the money is grossly inadequate. It works out at a few rupees for each woman in the country” Ranjana Kumari, director of the Delhi-based Centre for Social Research, told the Guardian.
Kumari, who is also a member of the National Commission for Empowerment of Women, added: “We have been asking for money to properly implement laws on domestic violence and to improve our terrible record on maternal mortality but there was nothing.”
£125m does sound pretty paltry, but breaking it down by rupees per woman is a pretty poor way to communicate that fact. If India has to spend a significant amount of money on each individual woman in the country in order to make it a safer place, they’ll go bankrupt. Couldn’t Kumari have provided research indicating the amount of money needed to effect change and compared it with the £125m figure?