The Asian Age: Mumbai: Monday, 07 July 2014.
Over 10,000
triable cases of atrocities against women were pending in the 32 district
sessions courts in the state by the end of March this year. The figure obtained
through RTI says that Thane district tops the list with 1,569 pendency cases
out of 10,821 such cases. The Pune district comes in second with 1,215 cases.
These figures
were procured by Pune-based RTI activist Vihar Durve who has been following the
issue for the last few years. He has demanded the state government give utmost
priority to setting up and starting fast track courts to dispose the cases.
“The Bombay
high court has informed me that court has written a letter to the government to
make its scheme for 100 fast-track courts a permanent feature beyond its 2016
deadline, but it seems that government is not serious,” he said.
Kalpana
Chavan, chief public prosecutor and in-charge of City Civil Court, Bombay,
said, “As far as Mumbai is concerned,
two special courts for looking into cases against the minors and two courts for
atrocities against women are operational and hence the number of pending cases
have gone down considerably.”
She added,
“Earlier courts had cases pending for more than five to six years, but now
cases are being disposed at faster pace.”
At present,
apart from Mumbai other women special courts are in Thane, Yeotmal, Pune,
Ahmadnagar, Akola, Amravati, Aurangabad, Buldhana, Beed, Jalgaon, Nagpur, and
Kolhapur.
The state
government has also issued a government resolution (GR) to set up an additional
14 special courts exclusively to hear cases of crimes against women. These new
special courts are to come up at Bhandara, Chandrapur, Dhule, Jalna, Latur,
Nanded, Nashik, Osmanabad, Parbhani, Sangli, Satara, Solapur, Wardha and
another one at Mumbai.
However, Mr
Durve said, “Unfortunately nothing has been done on this front. I have written
many letters to the chief minister and chief secretary of the state, but it
seems that my voice is going unheard at the governmental level.”
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