Police will now have to file an FIR on every complaint, the Union home ministry said today, ending the decades-old practice of lodging general diaries that allowed the law-keepers to sit on complaints without investigation. The move is a fallout of the high-profile Ruchika Girhotra molestation case where Haryana police had initially refused to file an FIR (first information report), apparently because the accused was a senior officer. The ministry is expected...

A moving report titled Gender Violence in India by Prajnya, a civil society organization, says that violence against women is on the rise in India. Close to 13.3% of total crimes against women are reported from just one state, Andhra Pradesh. (See the link below) The report, which uses the statistics of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), tells us that honour killings are often reported as torture or caste...

A bench of the Supreme Court recently said: “When you say it is the world’s oldest profession and when you are not able to curb it by laws, why don’t you legalise it?” Really? While dealing with a PIL filed by Bachpan Bachao Andolan about large scale child trafficking in the country, a Supreme Court bench of Justice Dalveer Bhandari and Justice AK Pattnaik are reported to have advised the...

To register a formal complaint with the police about snatched or stolen articles is often as tough as getting the item recovered. That’s an old axiom held by a good majority of Delhiites. And statistics go a long way into formalising it as a theory. Here’s from the police’s own record books: out of approximately 14,000 calls received by the Police Control Room (PCR) for “snatchings” this year, till November...

Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram on Tuesday said it was a matter of concern that the police, prosecutors and judges were ignoring the guidelines issued by the Centre on handling of cases of crime against women. Responding to supplementaries during the question hour in the Lok Sabha, he said there were strict guidelines on how a case (crime against women) should be investigated and prosecuted. “I agree that the guidelines are...