Daily Times Editorials 3rd September 2026

After Nirbhaya

India’s National Human Rights Commission has stepped in after a 16-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped on a moving private bus in Greater Noida, part of the Delhi metropolitan region. She had mistakenly got off at Pari Chowk on a rainy night, accepted a conductor’s assurance that the bus would take her towards her destination and climbed aboard. Police say the vehicle was not even running a regular passenger service. The driver and conductor allegedly assaulted her before abandoning her.

The setting carries an unbearable familiarity. Nearly fourteen years have passed since the 2012 Delhi bus gang rape convulsed India, forced changes to criminal law and gave the Nirbhaya Fund its name. Yet Delhi still recorded 1,088 rapes in 2023, the highest number among India’s 19 metropolitan cities, along with 1,755 cases under the child-protection law. Nationally, 29,536 rapes were reported in 2024 (more than 80 a day) while cases under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act climbed to a record 69,191.

India has certainly spent money and rewritten laws. By last year, more than $800 million had been allocated under the Nirbhaya Fund and over $600 million spent on safe-city projects, emergency response systems, fast-track courts, women’s help desks and transport safety. The sentences prescribed for rape are also said to have grown fiercer. Yet conviction rates are still abysmal. Severe punishment on paper offers limited protection when investigation is poor, prosecution falters and trials drag on.

The deeper rot sits inside social attitudes as well. India’s Supreme Court has itself spoken of “ingrained patriarchal attitudes and biases” while examining workplace safety after the rape and murder of a trainee doctor in Kolkata. The country’s new criminal code defines consent carefully and provides extremely harsh penalties for rape, yet still exempts marital rape from this provision. That contradiction says more about the unfinished argument over women’s bodily autonomy than another ministerial speech ever could.

Recent cases have stripped away any comforting idea that danger belongs to a particular neighbourhood or class. An 11-year-old girl was raped and murdered in West Bengal in July; a seven-year-old was raped and killed near Delhi; the Kolkata doctor was attacked inside a hospital after a 36-hour shift. Women have responded by marching, litigating and forcing reforms, only to be told again to travel carefully, share their locations, avoid deserted places and carry pepper sprays.

The burden of fear still falls far too heavily on the potential victim.

India likes its modernity displayed through gleaming metros, expressways and digital prowess. There is a much simpler measure waiting at its bus stops, railway stations, hospital corridors, classrooms and homes: whether a woman or girl can move through ordinary life without having to constantly look over her shoulder. *

Suthra Punjab

Lahore entered September with anti-littering squads fanning out across 200 markets and major roads. For now, offenders receive warnings, but from October 1, dropping rubbish in public can bring fines of up to Rs 10,000, while burning waste or tyres can cost as much as Rs 500,000 and, in serious cases, carry imprisonment. Field officers have been barred from receiving cash. For a city that has spent decades complaining about rubbish, the government is finally attaching a price to producing it.

Punjab has earned some standing to become demanding. Suthra Punjab has taken organised collection into towns and villages where municipal sanitation barely existed, backed by enormous public spending, a large vehicle fleet and digital monitoring. Once the state begins collecting waste reliably, the resident who throws it back onto a road or into a drain is no longer merely exposing municipal failure. He is adding another public cost to a service taxpayers have already financed.

That cost becomes painfully visible every monsoon. Plastic bags and household refuse repeatedly find their way into Lahore’s drainage network, forcing public agencies to clear material that should never have entered it. Burning the same waste transfers the burden from the drain to the lungs. The heavier penalties for tyre and waste burning therefore make sense in a province already fighting severe air pollution.

The difficulty is that Suthra Punjab itself has acquired a ledger the government cannot ignore.

Only last week, workers in Faisalabad protested over salaries and dues, saying loader-rickshaw drivers had gone unpaid for one month and 16 days and that Eid honoraria remained outstanding. In July, a sanitation worker in Gujranwala died after setting himself on fire following allegations that a contractor had been illegally deducting from his monthly salary.

The Anti-Corruption Establishment alleged in May that digital records in Faisalabad had been manipulated in a Rs 1 billion fraud, involving ghost workers, inflated container numbers and facilities shown on paper but absent on the ground.

Even the programme’s vehicles have come under scrutiny. On Monday, Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz ordered strict compliance with traffic laws after expressing grief over a minor girl killed by a Suthra Punjab vehicle. The instruction was necessary for reasons larger than traffic management: authority loses moral force when the machinery enforcing public discipline appears exempt from it.

None of this weakens the case for e-challans. It strengthens the case for applying the same standard throughout the system.

The test of Suthra Punjab should never be the number of challans it issues. A successful sanitation system eventually needs fewer fines because government, contractors and citizens have all learned what is expected of them. *