Lack of protection officers for domestic violence cases intrigues SC about Mission Shakti

The Supreme Court has sought more information from the government about Mission Shakti, an umbrella scheme for the safety, security, and empowerment of women, intrigued by a possible chronic shortage in protection officers to deal with domestic violence cases...

A government document in the top court shows that 4.4 lakh cases of domestic assault are pending across a sample 801 districts...

Though most of these districts have one-stop centres, established under Mission Shakti, to receive victims, there is still a lack of clarity about how many of them actually employ protection officers to effectively help the traumatised survivors...

Protection officers like the Magistrates who are tasked to the implementation of the enactment, have been conceived as the backbone to effectuate the law, enacted with laudable objectives, by Parliament, the Supreme Court has said.. Taking on record the governments figures, a Bench of Justices S. Ravindra Bhat and Dipankar Datta recently calculated that with 4.4 lakh cases pending in 801 districts, a protection officer in each of these districts would be saddled with more than 500 cases..

The government has also been asked to provide material to indicate how Mission Shakti would act as an umbrella scheme for implementation of the Domestic Violence Act, especially with respect to the statutory officers and remedies provided in the Act...

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