According to the Human Rights Law Network (HRLN), there was no follow-up and most of the girls involved in the program moved away from migrant communities. During the year, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reported visits to remand detainees in jails in Jammu and Kashmir. The police did not act on the complaints of the victim's mother.
The government failed to prosecute or conduct impartial investigations into these deaths by year's end.
Respect for Civil Liberties, Including
The government claimed that the newspaper article damaged the image of the ruling government. Police detained the young women under the Information Technology Act for posting comments on Facebook that were said to constitute a "malicious act intended to hurt religious sentiments". The posts complained about the large-scale protests that shut down the city following the death of prominent Shiv Sena political leader Bal Thackeray. The organization has filed a Right to Information (RTI) petition with the government to find out the official reason behind the denials.
The law allows for freedom of assembly and association, and the government generally respected these rights. The government generally only allowed UNHCR to assist asylum seekers and refugees from non-contiguous countries. Foreign travel: The government can legally deny a passport to any applicant for engaging in activities outside the country "prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of the nation".
UNHCR did not maintain an official presence in the country, but the government allowed UNHCR staff access to refugees in urban centers and. After the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, the government no longer registered Sri Lankans as refugees. In October, the Tamil Nadu government began a process to issue biometric cards to the 65,000 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees living in camps across the state.
Respect for Political Rights: The Right of Citizens to Change Their Government
Those born in the country on or after December 3, 2004 were only considered citizens if at least one parent was a citizen and the other was not illegally present in the country at the time of the child's birth. Persons born outside the country on or after December 10, 1992 were considered citizens if one of the parents was a citizen at birth, but those born outside the country after December 3, 2004 were not considered citizens, unless their birth was registered at an Indian Consulate within one year of the date of birth. There was fair and effective oversight by the Electoral Commission during the general elections in the eastern and northeastern parts of the country.
The NHRC has advocated for 300,000 migrant workers working in brick factories in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka to gain voting rights in the general elections in May. Families were forbidden to draw water from the village's communal well, forcing them to walk two and a half miles and pay another village to get safe drinking water. By the end of the year, politicians in Andhra Pradesh's Prakasam district had not registered a case against alleged caste discrimination.
Participation of women and minorities: The law requires that one-third of seats in local councils be reserved for women. The Constitution provides that to protect historically marginalized groups and ensure representation in the lower house of parliament, each state must reserve seats for scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs) in proportion to their population in the state . In the 2014 elections, 84 seats were reserved for SC candidates and 47 seats for ST candidates, representing 24 percent of the total seats in the lower house.
Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government
Kerala and Odisha reserve 50 percent of seats in urban local bodies for women, building on an existing quota of 50 percent for women in village councils in those states. Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal reserve 50 per cent seats in local councils for women. For example, after obtaining government documents under the Right to Information Act, a petitioner alleged misappropriation of funds in the Maharashtra Tribal Development Department.
Gaikwad to lead a special team to investigate alleged fraud involving diversion of funds intended for the welfare of the tribes for other purposes. Kanimozhi, a member of the upper house of parliament, was charged with accepting bribes in the counterfeit sale of 2G mobile telephony spectrum in 2008. On June 15, the Supreme Court of Madhya Pradesh ordered a special task force to investigate fraud within the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board, a government-established body that administers education course entrance examinations and tests for positions in the state government.
According to an RTI activist in Hyderabad, unidentified persons attacked six RTI activists in separate incidents in the states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh during the first half of the year. Financial Disclosure: The law requires asset disclosures for all officers in the Indian administrative services. Both the Election Commission and the Supreme Court upheld mandatory disclosure of criminal and financial records for election candidates.
Governmental Attitude Regarding International and
Government Human Rights Bodies: The NHRC is an independent and impartial investigative and advisory body established by the central government with a dual mandate to investigate and remedy cases of human rights violations and to promote public awareness of human rights. Human rights groups have argued that institutional and legal obstacles hinder the NHRC's work. Human rights NGOs have criticized the NHRC's budgetary dependence on the government and its policy of not investigating abuses older than a year.
Twenty-three of the 29 states also have Human Rights Commissions, which operate independently under the auspices of the NHRC. Human rights groups argued that state commissions were influenced by local politics and less likely to deliver fair judgments than the NHRC. In the course of its nationwide evaluation of state human rights committees, HRLN noted that most state committees had few or no minority, civil society or women representatives.
The Jammu and Kashmir Commission does not have the authority to investigate alleged human rights violations committed by members of paramilitary security forces. The NHRC has jurisdiction over all human rights violations, except in certain cases involving the military. Since the Ministry of Home Affairs controls paramilitary forces, the NHRC has authority to investigate cases of human rights violations committed by the ministry.
Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons
In those cases, the states of Jammu and Kashmir fall under the AFSPA, as in all other parts of the country. The Ministry of Women and Child Development has issued guidelines for the establishment of these social services, but due to the lack of funding. According to human rights groups, the practice of FGM/C was widespread among Dawoodi Bohra Muslims, a community in the western part of the country.
At the end of July, the police arrested two gym teachers and the president of the school. According to the director of the National Center for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People, the law considers persons with disabilities to be in need of social protection and medical care, not as possessing inherent rights such as persons with disabilities. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare estimates that 6 to 7 percent of the population has a mental or psychosocial disability.
NGOs reported that the government's annual reports did not provide any information on meeting the quota, but activists and NGOs stated that there were vacancies for persons with disabilities that had not been filled. There were reports of school officials excluding Dalit children from morning prayers, asking Dalit children to sit at the back of class or forcing them to clean school toilets while denying them access to the same facilities. In December, a petition was filed in the Madras High Court in Tamil Nadu against people entering manholes to remove waste because of the danger of the work.
The state-owned company acknowledged that about 30,000 passenger coaches were equipped with open-drain toilets, forcing railways to use manual toilets. According to the 2011-2012 annual report of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, there were more than 700 STs in the country, and the 2011 census showed that the number of ST members was 84.3 million, about 8 percent of the total population.
Worker Rights
Civil society activists continued to raise concerns about the government's inability to hold to account those responsible for the 1984 New Delhi community violence that left more than 3,000 people dead, the majority of whom were Sikhs, although slow progress was made in several court cases. . Similarly, civil society activists continued to raise concerns about the inability of the Gujarat government to hold accountable those responsible for the 2002 community violence in Gujarat, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,200 persons, of whom the majority were Muslim. In general, authorities prosecuted and punished those responsible for harassment or suppression of legitimate trade union activity in the industrial sector.
Freedom of association and the right to organize and bargain collectively were generally respected in the formal industrial sector, but not in the large, informal economy. Most union members were employed in the formal sector, with unions representing a small number of workers in the agricultural and informal sectors. Estimates of the number of forced laborers varied widely, although various NGOs put the number in the tens of millions.
International Labor Organization (ILO) to combat forced labour, including through the "convergence programme" established with the ILO in the states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha to target workers vulnerable to forced labour. Enforcement of safety and health standards was weak, particularly in the informal sector, but also in some formal sector industries. Violations of wage, overtime, and occupational safety and health standards were common in the informal sector (industries and/or enterprises not covered by the Factories Act), which employed 93 percent of workers.
