To check false registration of rape cases and their politicisation for compensation, the Union government has decided that the money to be awarded to rape victims will be decided by special fast track courts hearing the cases. Chetan Chauhan reports.
To check false registration of rape cases and their politicisation for compensation, the Union government has decided that the money to be awarded to rape victims will be decided by special fast track courts hearing the cases.
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Women and Child Development Minister Krishna Tirath said the Law Ministry had agreed that the power to award compensation should be vested with fast track courts.
“This has been done to check registration of false cases… We don’t want a scenario like in Inderpuri (West Delhi) where a woman accused a police officer of rape and later confessed that the allegation was levelled to save her husband, who was arrested by the police,” she said.
“There’ve been instances of politicisation of rape cases — as in Uttar Pradesh,” she said.
The UP government had arrested state Congress chief Rita Bahuguna Joshi for her anti-Mayawati remarks on the issue of compensation to several rape victims in the state.
The Centre’s decision has also raised some concerns.
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Bharati Ali, of HAQ for Child Rights, was sceptical whether giving powers to award compensation to fast track courts would work. “It will not help rape victims who need immediate rehabilitation,” she said.
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Bharati Ali, of HAQ for Child Rights, was sceptical whether giving powers to award compensation to fast track courts would work. “It will not help rape victims who need immediate rehabilitation,” she said.
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Raj Mangal Prasad of Delhi Police NGO Pratidhi, however, said the move might improve conviction rate in rape cases. “There will be an incentive to speak the truth,” he said.
As per National Crime Records Bureau, conviction rate in rape cases in 2006 was 19.5 per cent. Tirath said linking the compensation with fast track courts would ensure speedy justice for the victims.
For this, the Law Ministry has agreed to provide money to state governments to set up fast track courts for rape cases.
The WCD Ministry, too, has linked disbursement of compensation with setting up of fast track courts. It has a formulated a scheme of Rs 150 crore.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
