At the end of 2020, India has 19,483 cases of atrocities against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes pending Police disposal. This effectively means these cases have not even gone to court while the number of pending cases have been adding up. While pending cases under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act for crimes against SCs were at 17,133, the number was at 2,370 for STs. And this has been steadily rising over the years.
In the pandemic year, as we refer to 2020 now, there were 45,995 cases filed under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act registered for crimes against SCs and 7,891 cases for crimes committed against STs. The cases pending disposal have been piling up and increasing by 10 per cent every year.
The number of cases chargesheeted out of cases filed this year for crimes against SCs stood at 29,142. While for STs the number of chargesheeted cases stood at 5,344. That's 63.36 per cent and 67.72 per cent of the total number of cases filed during the year respectively.
But that's just the cases filed under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989 which "punishes caste-based atrocities against the members of SC/ST by non-SC/ST persons". Crimes against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes continued to rise in 2020, with maximum cases of offences against the communities being registered in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, according to the latest government data. Last year, 50,291 cases were registered for crimes committed against Scheduled Castes (SCs), an increase of 9.4 per cent over 2019 (45,961 cases).
The NCRB data stated that 16,543 cases of "simple hurt" formed the largest chunk (32.9 per cent) of cases of crimes or atrocities against SCs during 2020. It was followed by cases under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (4,273 cases or 8.5 per cent) and cases under criminal intimidation (3,788 cases or 7.5 per cent), it said. The data also showed that another 3,372 cases were lodged for rape, 3,373 for assault on women with intent to outrage modesty, 855 for murder and 1,119 for attempted murder od SCs.
It went on to show that during 2020, simple hurt cases (2,247) formed the highest number of cases of crimes or atrocities against STs accounting for 27.2 per cent of cases, followed by rape with 1,137 cases (13.7 per cent) and assault on women with intent to outrage her modesty with 885 cases (10.7 per cent).
