Subnational Women’s Safety Index for India

This dataset accompanies “A Subnational Women’s Safety Index for India: Evidence from DHS Clusters” (Mahmood, Maitra and Buchhorn, 2026). It provides a women’s safety index for India at the district-level geographic scale. The index measures the foundations of women’s safety, meaning the conditions that leave women more or less exposed to violence, rather than reported incidents of violence. The index is built from individual-level records in two rounds of India’s National Family Health Survey (the Indian DHS) [NFHS-4 and NFHS-5]. District boundaries are harmonised across rounds so that changes over time are comparable.