Aastha Kunj assault site was flagged as a Delhi Police 'dark spot'

The area around Aastha Kunj Park, where a 17-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped on the evening of September 21, had already been identified in Delhi Police's dark-spot surveys as a poorly lit stretch, even though the lighting gaps persisted at the time of the alleged assault.

The park and the roads around it are among the locations where police have repeatedly flagged inadequate illumination to civic agencies. The dark-spot exercise is conducted regularly: officers identify stretches with little or no lighting despite steady pedestrian movement and write to the agency concerned seeking repairs or new streetlights. It is meant to function as an early-warning system, pinpointing places where darkness, footfall and weak surveillance could combine to create safety risks.

Data for the southeast district shows how widespread the problem is. Of 1,525 streetlights recorded across the district, 33% were found to be non-functional. A senior police officer described the figure as particularly worrying given the size of the area and the volume of pedestrians, and said that even 1,500 lights were inadequate for the district.

In Amar Colony, roughly a kilometre from the park and home to several paying guest accommodations and flats housing women students, 14 of 54 streetlights were found non-functional on the Captain Gaur Marg–Modi Mill Flyover stretch. On the Lala Lajpat Rai Marg–Kalkaji Mandir stretch, 43 of 150 lights were not working, while 10 of 58 on Raja Dheer Singh Marg were non-functional. In the Kalkaji police station area, eight of 20 streetlights near the Nehru Place flyover were also found to be out.

A police official said these deficiencies, among many others, were shared with the Delhi Development Authority, which manages the park and its surroundings, but that repairs and installation were not carried out. The DDA said the lighting installations in the park were functional and were inspected regularly.

The case has drawn attention to what happens when gaps identified through the dark-spot survey are not addressed. A visit to the spot after the incident found stretches inside the park that were dark after sunset. Police said the CCTV camera at Gate No. 7 was non-functional, while footage from other cameras covering the park was used to trace and identify the accused. Investigating officers described the lighting inside the park as poor, with some stretches becoming so dark in the evening that visibility was negligible without a torch. The lack of illumination, they said, made patrolling and surveillance difficult.

The concerns matter because Aastha Kunj serves as a connecting route between neighbourhoods including Sant Nagar, Garhi Village, Greater Kailash and the Nehru Place area, and is used by students, residents and commuters.

After the alleged gang rape, fresh complaints have been filed by women students about other public spaces, including National Park, adjacent to a college's back gate, and Hakikat Park in Mukherjee Nagar.