Despite sustained campaigns and legalchanges, convictions have declined steadily From the near-illegible notes scrawled by investigators at the Prasad Nagar police station, we know this: ever since 2005, the young woman who walked in through their doors last month had been stalked by her brother-in-law, given flowers and chocolate and beatings. There was the time, a bottle of rat-poison in his hand, he threatened to kill himself if she did not declare...

In 1953, the authors of India's first-ever crime survey presented a grim picture of the state of the new country's police forces. “There has been,” authors of Crime in Indiareported, “no improvement in the methods of investigation or in the application of science to this work. No facilities exist in any of the rural police stations and even in most of the urban police stations for scientific investigation.” From the National Crime...

-Economic and Political Weekly Strict implementation of NHRC guidelines for investigation into fake “encounters” is a must. The killing of five suspected bank robbers in Chennai on 23 February by police officers tasked with apprehending them looks suspiciously like yet another case of a fake “encounter”. News reports following the killing have brought out various inconsistencies in the claim of the police that they fired in self-defence.   After directives from the National Human...

Number of girls who disappeared from Bengal last year — 3,000. Over 5,000 children went missing in 2010. But the state doesn’t seem to be bothered. “During an inquiry we found that Bengal is yet to set up anti-trafficking cells in districts to evolve a foolproof mechanism for combating trafficking. The police administration does not seem concerned even though trafficking of girls is on the rise,” said a CBI official attached to...

-The United Nations Recent global events have highlighted the fact that journalists and media workers reporting on human rights issues are particularly vulnerable to threats and attacks, an independent United Nations expert said today, calling for greater protection for those who carry out such vital work. “Because of the potential impact on society that journalists and media workers can have by disseminating information about human rights through a wide array of media,...