New Delhi: In December 2012, a 23-year-old paramedical student was gang-raped and brutally tortured by six men in Delhi, leading to her death days later.
This led to massive protests across the country, triggering a series of legislative and legal reforms.
Among them was a corpus collection, Nirbhaya Fund, which the Union government announced in its budget of 2013 with an initial amount of Rs 100 crore. It was aimed at implementing initiatives to enhance security and safety for women in the country.
Starting then, there have been subsequent allocations. In 2014-15 budget, the finance minister pumped in Rs 1000 crore, in 2016-17 it was cut down to Rs 550 crore and the same amount was allocated in 2017-18. The total corpus fund now stands at Rs 3100 crore.
The fund, however, has seen a very lackadaisical utilization over the years. One must note that the fund is a non-lapsable corpus fund.
The Ministry of Home Affairs, in a response to the Parliament a month ago, said that 18 projects that had been approved under the Nirbhaya Funds had not utilised the money allocated to them.
ALMOST 50% FUNDS LYING UNUSED
As per data released by the MHA, various projects under different ministries have not even used half of the funds allocated to them in all these years.
Take for example the Integrated Emergency Response Management System (IERMS) under the Ministry of Railways. The project was to provide 24x7 security to women across railway stations, strengthen security control rooms, deploy more Railway Police Force (RPF) and install CCTV.
The project was appraised at Rs 500 crore, out of which a meagre Rs 50 crore has been utilised so far.
The MHA’s Cyber Crime Prevention against Women and Children project was appraised at Rs 195.83 crore out of which only Rs 82 crore has been utilised.
Similarly, the ministry’s Investigative Unit for Crime Against Women was appraised at Rs 324 crore, but none of that has been utilised. Interestingly, the ministry said that the project has been dropped, reasons of which were not mentioned.
The project was proposed by the MHA in January 2015 with 50:50 partnership involving state governments in most crime-prone districts. It aimed “to investigate cases referred to them, augment the investigative machinery of the States in relation to the heinous crimes against women, especially Rape, Dowry Death, Acid Attack and Human Trafficking, instill confidence and encourage women to come forward and lodge their complaint and improve the gender ratio in the State Police forces.”
Similarly, the MHA’s project on Organized Crime Investigative Agency was appraised at Rs 83.20 crores, out which the expenditure has been zero.
The Ministry of Women and Child Development’s Abhaya Project, which was proposed by the Andhra Pradesh government to ensure safety of women and children during transport was appraised at Rs 138.49 crore, but only Rs 58.64 crores has been utilised.
Delhi Police’s Special Unit for Women and Children was appraised at Rs 23.53 crores out of which a meagre Rs 2.35 crore has been spent. Similarly, its project to hire professional counsellors was evaluated at Rs 5.07 crores out of which only Rs 0.05 crores (Rs 5 lakh) has been utilised.
Project for ensuring women safety in public transport by the Uttar Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation (UPSRTC) was assessed at Rs 83.50 crore out of which only Rs 40.20 crore has been utilised. The Safe City Project in Bhubaneshwar by the government of Odisha was appraised at Rs 110.35 crores and none of that money has been utilised so far.
WITH RISING CRIME, UTILISATION UNDER SCANNER
The underutilisation or no utilisation of Nirbhaya Funds has now come under the radar of the Supreme Court.
The apex court has asked the states to reveal the amount they’ve received under the Nirbhaya Funds and to apprise the court of how the money has been disbursed to victims of sexual assault. The court observed that it was a sad state of affairs that there was no record of how many victims of sexual assault had received compensation and to what extent. The SC bench will review the same on February 15.
This was not the first time that utilisation under the huge corpus fund had come under attack. In 2016, a parliamentary standing committee slammed the Ministry of Women and Child Development over the slow implementation of schemes under the Nirbhaya Fund.
Furthermore, a report by the Centre for Development and Human Rights (CDHR) stated that lengthy inter-ministerial coordination for project approval had created problems in implementation of Nirbhaya Fund schemes.
Even as there seem to be bureaucratic loopholes and severe underutilisation of corpus funds, statistics released by the National Crime Records Bureau continue to paint a dismal picture of women safety and security across the country.
Crimes against women have increased from 3,29,243 in 2015 to 3,38,954 in 2016. Similarly, crimes against children rose from 94,172 in 2015 to 1,06,958 in 2016.
Uttar Pradesh reported 14.5% (49,262 out of 3,38,954 cases) of total cases of crimes against women followed by West Bengal at 9.6% (32,513 cases), during 2016. Delhi reported the highest crime rate (160.4) compared to the national average rate of 55.2.
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