A team of the National Commission for Women (NCW) will arrive in West Bengal next week to conduct an independent probe into the series of alleged rapes being reported from across the State. The three-member panel, headed by NCW member Wansuk Syiem, will includes member-secretary Anita Agnihotri and member Nirmala Sawant Prabhalkar, an NCW official told The Hindu over phone from New Delhi on Friday. The panel had taken suo motu cognisance...

A report sent to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) by the NGO, Navsarjan, has revealed that dalits in Gujarat are frequently forced to leave their native villages because of clashes with members of forward castes. Denial of entry into temples is another reason for dalit migration in the state, the report states. The NHRC has taken serious note of the allegations made in the report. Earlier this month, it issued...

West Bengal: The murder of two CPI(M) leaders in Bardhaman district points to an increase in political violence in the State. THE brutal murder of Pradip Tah, a former legislator belonging to the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or the CPI(M), and Kamal Gayen, another senior leader of the party, in broad daylight, allegedly by Trinamool Congress supporters, in West Bengal's Bardhaman district on February 22 once again points to an...

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...

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...