Finance
Minister P Chidambaram on Monday allocated an additional Rs 1,000 crore to the
Nirbhaya Fund for
the safety and empowerment
of women.
"In
order to make it clear that the (Nirbhaya) fund will be a prominent fund, I
intend to declare the grant of Rs 1,000 crore as non-lapsable and in order to
support more proposals, I propose to contribute to the fund another Rs 1,000
crore next year," Chidambaram said while presenting the interim budget in
Parliament. In last year's Budget,
Chidambaram had announced the Nirbhaya Fund with a corpus of Rs 1,000 crore as
a tribute to the gangrape victim. Nirbhaya (fearless) was the pseudonym given
to the victim. "To ensure the
dignity and safety of women, I promised the Nirbhaya Fund and put Rs 1,000
crore to the fund," Chidambaram said. The Cabinet has already cleared two proposals
that will receive support from the fund.
In
January, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved a Rs 1,405-crore
project to track and monitor public transport and provide alarm buttons for
alerting authorities. The project
involves setting up closed-circuit television (CCTVs) and GPS in public
transport vehicles. The government set a deadline of February 20, 2014, for
public transport vehicles running in major cities with a population of over 10
lakh to install GPS devices.