Uttarakhand & Mizoram top in allocating Nirbhaya funds at 50%, Maharashtra bottoms at zero

Now that the celebrations and jubilation about the Hyderabad police encounter on 6th December is over, let's focus on some facts. While this CIA style encounter may have pacified the country's immediate anger and rage over piling cases of sexual crimes against women, let's not forget that this is just a band-aid until we get social and police reforms to prevent these kinds of crimes in the first place, which is where all the efforts should be spent.

Let's also not forget that this encounter and cry for justice wouldn't be even needed today had the cops who were approached initially took the complaint with haste and attempted to find Disha on 27th November. The best measure of how good policing works in a state is prevention of these crimes in the first place, not the encounters made to pacify people's blood lust afterwards!

While we appreciate the Telangana police today, let's not forget the police departments of those states who made an attempt to prevent these crimes by spending the Nirbhaya Funds.

Source: Times of India

These funds, totalling Rs. 2,264 crores, were allocated to all states and UTs after the Nirbhaya incident in 2012. Out of them, the states of Uttarakhand and Mizoram have spent 50% of the funds allocated to them in things like setting up medical labs, installing CCTV cameras, hiring more police personnel, ensuring street lamps, etc. as per the guidelines. These are the police departments we should be celebrating, not the ones that go around doing encounters!

Unfortunately, some states like Maharashtra have either not spent anything out of the Nirbhaya funds or unwilling to provide that data. Similarly, Tripura, TN, Manipur, Delhi, etc. have spent less than 5% of funds, even Telangana has spent only 6%. This shows how much these state governments really care about preventing the sex offences in their states.

As an Indian citizen, you should push your governments and representatives to make use of Nirbhaya funds for the cause its allocated for and not anywhere else. Who knows, they might simply end up spending them on things like political rallies and election campaigns instead of that? I think the CAG also has a role to play in monitoring of this.

It is surprising that many people (even women) in our country are pushing for more CIA style encounters instead of these boring measures which are truly beneficial to them. Whether its Punjab or Kashmir or Mumbai, we have all seen what happens to the society when the cops are given a free hand in doing wholesale encounters. Let's hope that sanity prevails in our society and the system improves so that we don't have to rely on Singhams or Chulbul Pandeys for our right to justice.