Sakhi One Stop Centres — India's National Scheme for Women Survivors of Violence

India's One Stop Centre scheme, branded Sakhi, became operational on 1 April 2015 under the Ministry of Women and Child Development as part of the government's National Mission for Empowerment of Women, financed through the Nirbhaya Fund. Each centre is designed to bring police facilitation, medical aid, legal aid and counselling, psycho-social support and short-term shelter (up to five days) together "under one roof" for women and girls affected by violence, regardless of caste, class, religion, region, sexual orientation or marital status.
The scheme has scaled substantially: funding was first sanctioned for 33 states/UTs in 2015-16, and by 2024 more than 750 centres were operational, covering nearly all of India's roughly 730 districts. Between 2015 and 2022, Sakhi centres assisted 668,139 women, according to reporting that draws on government figures.
Independent investigative reporting (iSignal, May 2023) also documents significant implementation gaps: as of 2022 only about Rs 328 crore of the Rs 735 crore released had actually been spent — under 45% — and centre staff, including case workers earning around Rs 15,000 a month, reported salary delays and no pay rise since 2017 at one state centre. The same reporting found minimal police awareness of OSC services limiting referrals, Domestic Incident Reports filed in only 6% of examined Chhattisgarh cases, and that only 13% of Indian women who experience spousal violence seek any help at all.
Sakhi is therefore a genuine gap-filler for the coverage map — a nationwide, government-run, one-stop GBV response model reaching hundreds of thousands of women a year — but the evidence base is honest about its uneven implementation, making it a useful cautionary as well as illustrative case for scaling one-stop services.

Read the full analysis: https://www.isignal.in/governance/one-stop-many-challenges-sakhi-centres-struggle-to-support-women-survivors-of-violence-861666