CHANDIGARH (TIP): For women in the region, Women’s Day could be just another day, with safety being their prime concern. Seven cases of rape and gang rape were reported from Punjab, Haryana and Delhi, including the National Capital Region, on March 7, besides incidents of violence against women. After a paramedical student died after she was gang- raped, beaten and thrown out of a moving bus along with a male friend in Delhi on December 16 last year, the government had promised to make the nation safer for women.

In fact, a Rs 1,000 crore sum was set aside in the Union Budget to create a fund for women safety. But even as these decisions are yet to translate into action, a case of gang rape and rape were registered in the holy city of Amritsar. The incident took place months after an ASI was killed while protecting his daughter’s honour. In Haryana a minor girl went missing from Tarauri police station area in Karnal. When after a search the girl was found, she was sent for a medical examination that confirmed rape by her abductor. In Gurgaon a call centre employee alleged she was raped by her male colleagues, but later retracted her statement, saying that she did not want to pursue the matter.

There is hardly a day in Haryana that passes by without an incident of rape. Sixtyone cases of rape have been reported in the state in the first two months of the year. In Lohari Ragho village of Hisar, a married Dalit woman was raped by two persons. Though the police claim to have arrested the accused, it has failed to check crime against women, putting the state among the most unsafe for women.

In another incident, three youth gang raped a minor girl in Bani village of Sirsa. While the police claim to have nabbed the accused in a swift action, but in a majority of the cases the police only expresses helplessness. The minor’s medical examination confirmed sexual violence. In yet another incident three men abducted and attacked a 19-year-old woman who had got into an auto rickshaw near a popular shopping centre in Delhi’s satellite city of Ghaziabad.

The woman was abducted in broad daylight, taken to a secluded place and subsequently raped. In Delhi a 25-year-old woman was given a drug-laced soft drink by a person in a park in east Delhi last night and was allegedly raped by some men in a car. She was found by the police in an unconscious state on March 7 morning