For women, going to college in Delhi was all about location, location, location. There was a great divide between the South and North Campus.

The North Campus is the hub of Delhi University, but getting there was a nightmare if you didn’t have private transport. It meant a long journey by bus; the University specials were reasonably safe, but if you missed the last U-special back home, you’d have to jostle onto a crowded vehicle and face harassment or worse from male commuters.

The South Campus was considered much safer, but it was felt that students missed out on the back-and-forth of life at the university.

So I was slightly surprised when a very conservative couple I know announced that their daughter would be going to college in the North Campus. When her older sister had applied six years ago, the parents made it very clear that there was no question of considering anything but the South Campus colleges: getting to North Campus was too unsafe.

“But now there’s the Metro,” the mother said. “It’s so fast and it’s safe, so we are not very worried.”

Calcuttans may permit themselves a smile of superiority; the Calcutta Metro has been one of the city’s proudest possessions, a model of cleanliness and efficiency that is also reasonably safe. In Delhi, the Metro does not yet provide access everywhere, but its presence has been changing the way women live in a notoriously unsafe city.

The stations are fairly efficiently policed; potential assailants are slightly restrained by the awareness that they can’t escape from a subway car as easily as from a bus; and because the Metro always seems to be crowded, there are fewer lonely areas in the stations where a woman might be at risk.

In the early days of the Metro, the curious flocked to this new form of transport in such numbers that women actually stayed away.

There were too many people for the Metro police to control; taking the subway was risking harassment. But the novelty has worn off, and the fares are just high enough to discourage the average idler.

The real problem for women isn’t with the subway itself but with the access points ? the routes to the stations weren’t always designed with safety in mind.

All the same, the Metro has changed things for women across the board.

It’s not just college students who feel safer on the Metro; working women, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, say that the automated ticketing system protects them from the harassment they often face from bus conductors.

And both groups feel more comfortable travelling after dark on the subway than they do using most other forms of transport, from buses to auto-rickshaws and even taxis.

It’s interesting to see how something as apparently simple as safe and cheap transport can have such a direct impact on the quality of women’s lives.

Now all we have to pray for is that Delhi’s men, never celebrated for their sensitivity, won’t find a way to ruin one of the city’s more promising institutions.