Delhi remains unsafe for women despite long list of measures

About 95% cases filed in 2015 still being probed.

Despite a series of initiatives announced by the police after the December 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape, Delhi continues to be an unsafe city for women.

The initiatives were announced as spontaneous protests broke out in the national capital after the shocking brutality of the gangrape. Four years after Parliament passed a series of amendments, the ground situation remains as grim as before.

As many as 8,527 cases of crime against women were lodged in the last seven months in comparison to 17,030 cases registered last year. One of the key reasons why crime against women is on the rise since 2012 is the poor conviction rate recorded in these cases.

Of the 6,046 registered cases of crime against women in 2012, only 71 ended in conviction. In 2013, as many as 12,865 cases of crime against women were lodged, but only 65 ended up in convictions. The conviction rate in such cases was the lowest ever in 2014, when only nine people were convicted in 15,236 cases lodged against those involved in crimes against women.

Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) chairperson Swati Maliwal said that neither the Central nor the city government is keen to resolve issues related to women’s safety and security in the national capital. “After the December 2012 incident, a special task force (STF) on women’s safety was formed under the chairmanship of the home secretary, but meetings were never held on a regular basis. Last time, the meeting took place was in December 2015. The meeting should be held every month to improve safety mechanisms,” Ms Maliwal said. According to her, in July 2016, the home ministry wrote a letter to Raj Niwas for reconstitution of the STF on the safety issues of the women in Delhi under chairmanship of the lieutenant-governor with the representatives of the Delhi police and other concerned offices as its members.

According to the DCW, low conviction rate and subsequently filing of poor chargesheets in crimes against women by the police was one of the major factors that dents women safety initiatives. As per Delhi police’s reply to the DCW, about 95 per cent cases of crime against women filed in 2015 were still under investigation. No chargesheet was filed in these cases till February 2016.

The slow progress in filing chargesheets is one of the major setbacks to the women’s safety initiatives, which included speedy trials by fast-track courts.

One of the key initiatives was to form thana-level women safety committees, which would includes representatives of NGOs working on women’s empowerment, RWAs, principals of prestigious colleges, MLAs and SHOs.

The aim of this committee was to bring all the stakeholders and implementers to work in close coordination with each other for women’s safety in their respective localities. But, Ms Maliwal said, these committees have not even been notified in the past one-and-a-half years.

“Proper implementation of this could review crime against women at grassroots level.”

About other women’s safety initiatives, the Delhi police had clearly mentioned that there should be safe environment for school-going girls with regular patrolling around educational institutions. But recently, a schoolgirl was allegedly raped and burnt to death by a stalker in the Gandhi Nagar area.

Despite this, the Delhi police claims that they conduct a fortnightly meeting on women’s safety and ensure all possible steps to all senior officials under the presence of the commissioner of police.

“All police officials were instructed to increase police presence in vulnerable areas, ensure preventive action, focus on community approach programme, and strongly deal with the criminals involved in crime against women,” Delhi police PRO Rajan Bhagat said.

He reiterated that senior supervisory officers continuously monitor the efforts taken for women’s safety.