In Delhi, 10 women are abducted every day.
Five women are raped daily in the city.
In 2014, 3,507 women were kidnapped, 1,838 were raped.
The Delhi Government has not spent a single rupee from the Nirbhaya Fund in the last three years.
The year began with horror for Ramesh, a salesman in an upscale Khan Market shop and father of 16-year-old Jyoti. On New Year’s Day, she stepped out of her home in the high security Tughlak Road at around 3.45 pm to go to the market and meet her friends like any other teenager. She never came back. The family kept waiting and waiting. Finally Ramesh rushed to the Tughlak Road police station. The SHO told him to wait. A Missing Person’s Report was filed. Two months have passed, and the distraught father is still waiting for Jyoti to come home. “The police have registered a case of kidnapping and they are still trying to trace my daughter. God alone knows where she is,” says Ramesh, stifling a sob. Despite a Rs 1,000-crore Nirbhaya Fund set up by the UPA, which has been doubled by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley “in order to support programmes for women security, advocacy and awareness”, not a single rupee has been spent by the Delhi government in the past three years. The Delhi Police has used up only Rs 1 crore. The latest data from the National Crime Records Bureau notes that in Delhi, 10 women and girls are abducted each day and five are raped. In 2014, 3,507 cases of kidnapping of women and girls and 1,838 rape cases were registered. Just before the tabling of the budget, the number of Rape Crisis Centres was cut drastically—from the 660 centres promised, now only 36 will be set up. Obviously the rhetoric does not reflect the reality.
Nine days after Jyoti vanished, a 33-year-old married woman did not return home from a garment export company in Fatehpur Beri where she worked as an embroiderer and tailor. She usually would return to her Sultanpuri home by 7 pm where she lived with her husband and three daughters. Since she didn’t reach home by 8 pm, her husband—an invalid— called her on her mobile phone, but it was switched off. He checked with her office and colleagues and was told she had left at 6 pm. He called the police control room. The next day, a security guard working in the DDA nursery near the Sultanpur Metro Station found her body behind some bushes at 8:20 am. During the investigation, the police found that she was gangraped and murdered. These grim incidents and statistics present the exactly opposite of what the government have been showcasing as its resolve to combat crimes against women. Every day, 107 girls and women are kidnapped and 83 are raped across the country. In the last four years, a total of 1,64,615 girls and women were kidnapped and 1,12,981 were raped in India. In Delhi, this figures are 11,361 and 4,752 respectively. In 2014, there were 38,907 cases of abduction and 30,136 rapes across India. In 2013, of 51,881 registered kidnap cases of women across the country, 3,609 were from Delhi and of 33,707 rape cases, 1,636 incidents took place in the capital. In 2012, of 38,262 cases of abduction nationwide, 2,160 were in Delhi and of 24,932 rape cases, 706 happened in the city.
An analysis of rape incidents in 2014 by Delhi Police states that in 20.30 per cent of rape cases, the accused are neighbours; in 44.42 per cent cases they are friends and family friends; 13.62 per cent of the accused are relatives of the victims and in 3.19 per cent cases, the offenders are employers and co-workers. In 14.40 per cent of cases, the perpetrators are known to the victims and in only 4.06 per cent, the rapists are strangers. This also includes 586 cases (28.32 per cent) in which the accused were in live-in-relationships or refused to marry the woman.
MONEY IN DEEP FREEZE: Rs 79,258 crore has been allotted through various social security schemes for women folk, but money to be spent on women’s safety will have to be covered only by the stillborn Nirbhaya Fund. Last year, Rs 200 crore was earmarked for women’s safety measures. Rs 150 crore went to making cities safer for women and Rs 50 crore was for making public transport safer. The poorly trained and understaffed police are struggling to combat crimes against women, but the new government is engaged in a tug of war with the home ministry over ownership of Delhi Police.
