Long wait for justice as pendencies in rape cases mount

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The gang-rape of a 17-year-old girl on September 21 by three men who posed as police personnel at Astha Kunj Park near Kalkaji Mandir in Southeast Delhi and social media videos from Bihar’s Jamui and Samastipur showing harassment of girls, have once again raised concerns about women’s safety in public spaces and the need for prompt and stringent preventive and punitive measures.

Legislative changes over the years, especially since the 2012 Nirbhaya rape case in Delhi, have introduced tougher punishments and set timelines for disposal of rape cases.

However, an analysis of rape cases from the reports of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) shows that the country still has a long way to go in ensuring justice in a time-bound manner. (This analysis does not include rape cases filed under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, which are reported separately by the NCRB).

The country’s conviction rate of less than 30% of rape cases is already low, and analysis showed that even for those cases that result in conviction, the wait is usually long.

The chart below shows the number of cases of rape registered every year since 2018. This translates to an average of 84 cases per day and nearly three cases per hour.

Further data show that roughly 2% of the cases that were sent to trial ended in conviction within the same year.

This is quite low even if one were to assume that the cases that went to trial towards the end of the year could spill over to the subsequent year despite following legally mandated deadlines.

Although the number of new cases has remained fairly constant, the pendency in the courts has grown consistently over the years, as shown in the chart below.

The chart below shows that only a small fraction of cases entering the system result in a conviction after trial within the same year. The chart shows data for 2024, the latest year for which the NCRB has released the data.

Nearly 40,000 cases were taken up for investigation in 2024, which included the 29,536 rape cases reported that year. The rest were predominantly cases pending from the previous year and a handful of cases that were reopened.

Of these cases in the investigation pool, about 25,000 (63%) were chargesheeted, while the rest ended up in the categories of pending police investigation, transfer of the case to another investigative agency, or disposal by the police if they found that the investigation did not warrant further proceedings.

When the chargesheeted cases went to trial, they added to the lakhs of cases that were already in the trial backlog, bringing the total rape cases in the trial pool to 2,06,777 cases. Nearly 90% of these remained pending at the end of the year.

Of the rest of the 20,587 cases disposed of by the judiciary, nearly 68% were acquittals, 8% were discharged, and the remaining 24% ended up in convictions.

Only 421 of those cases resulted in convictions — which is just 2% of those taken up for trial that year and less than 1.5% of the total rape cases filed that year.

A look at the previous years also revealed similar patterns. In 2023, only 2.3% of cases that went to trial ended up in conviction, while these figures for 2022 and 2021 respectively were 1.9% and 1.2%, which emphasise the need for additional measures beyond the legislative amendments to ensure time-bound delivery of justice.

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