For days her husband had been asking to come back, and the workers at the Women Protection Centre where her case was registered had been clear that he was violent and was not to be let in. When she called the Centre to ask what to do, the line rang out. Her son fell ill, and she called again, and again no one answered. She let her husband back in, and the abuse returned. When she came to the Centre afterwards and was asked why she had not followed her instructions, she said she had called several times. The calls had left no trace at the Centre’s end, and there was nothing further to be said. The institution meant to protect her had told her to telephone for help, and when she did, the telephone failed.

Punjab’s Protection of Women Against Violence Act 2016 is the provincial law that first made domestic violence a criminal offence in Punjab. The Centres were established under Punjab's Protection of Women Against Violence Act 2016, the provincial law that first made domestic violence a criminal offence in Punjab. Operating under the act, the Centres were intended to gather under one roof what a survivor would otherwise have to assemble for herself across a city: a registered complaint, a lawyer, a medical examination and a referral to the police, and a telephone helpline was attached so that a woman who could not present herself in person could still reach the service. For the women the Act was written for, the helpline was not a convenience but the only way in. A woman who cannot leave the house unobserved, who has no money for transport, who is watched, reaches the Centre by phone or not at all.

During fieldwork, I saw workers struggling to meet basic requirements to keep services running, including staff counting individual pens and getting printouts with limited paper available for a paper-centric government job. Once, a printout I needed took close to half an hour, since the office had neither a working internet connection nor a USB drive. The landline remained disconnected for long stretches whenever the bill went unpaid, and the workers then reached survivors, lawyers, and the police on their personal phones. Lavee and Strier (2019) describe such an arrangement as coerced discretion, since the institution withholds the means required to do the work and the worker, left with no alternative, supplies them from her own salary. 

I telephoned the women whose cases had been registered at one of the Centres, and fewer than a quarter answered with a working number. Where a call was answered, the person on the line was frequently not the woman herself but a man of her household, a husband, brother, uncle or neighbour, because the number recorded at intake belonged to him, the survivor owning no phone of her own. The instrument through which the Centre was meant to reach her, therefore, ran, in a large proportion of cases, through the very household she had approached the Centre to escape, and the institution retained no independent means of contacting her. The economic dependence that had made it difficult for her to leave in the first place was the same dependence that, once her case was open, placed her on the far side of a line her family controlled. The same economic dependence that had made it so hard for her to leave was the dependence that now placed her, once her case was open, on the far side of a line her family controlled.

Amartya Sen (1999) distinguishes the process aspect of freedom and its opportunity aspect, between holding a right in form and having the capability to exercise it. A woman whose case is registered holds, on paper, the right to call her Centre for protection. Whether she can in fact do so depends on conditions the right itself says nothing about: that she owns a phone, that the number on file be hers and not her abuser’s, that the line she is told to call be funded and answered. For the woman with means, the helpline is a process she can use. For the woman the Act was most concerned to protect, watched and dependent and without a number of her own, the same helpline is a right she has no opportunity to exercise. The protection the state offers is calibrated, in practice, to the very inequality it was meant to redress, reaching most easily the women who needed it least.

Read at the desk: her case looks like that of a survivor who did not follow instructions. Read against the conditions of the service, it is something else: a line that did not connect, a file that moved nowhere on her return, and a worker whose only way of reaching her was a phone she had paid for herself. Masood and Nisar (2021) call this a public service gap, the distance between what frontline workers are required to deliver and what they are given to deliver it with, and the gap, left unclosed, does not stay at the institution. It travels down to the worker and, through her, to the woman waiting on a call the Centre can no longer afford to make. Across the Centres, this was the ordinary shape of failure, rarely a refusal at the door, more often a phone that rang out, a visit that produced nothing, and a survivor recalculating, over a sequence of unanswered attempts, whether it was worth returning at all. By the time she stopped coming, her file was usually still open, though she had passed beyond the institution’s reach.

She herself, on the night her husband stood at the door, was not choosing freely. She weighed what the Centre had told her against his presence, her son’s illness, and the silence on the line she had been instructed to call, and decided on what she had. To call that noncompliance is to imagine the instruction came with the means to follow it. It had not.

The workers I spoke to knew all of this. Many had been raising the resource issue with their superiors for years and had kept the Centres open with their own phones and money. That they managed to do so does not close the gap; it conceals it and lets the state go on underfunding a service whose shortfall its workers have, in effect, agreed to pay. Nearly a decade after the Act, the ambition written into the law has not been matched by the money required to honour it, and the cost of that gap is not borne evenly. It falls on the women the Act is named after, the ones without a phone, without a private number, without the means to be found. What is outstanding is not a legislative question but a fiscal one: whether the state is willing to pay for the freedom it has, on paper, already promised these women.

Rida Fatima is an MS Business and Public Policy student at LUMS. This essay draws on the MS fieldwork conducted at four Women Protection Centres in Punjab, undertaken as part of her thesis at LUMS.