Summary: The Jharkhand High Court, in a suo motu public interest litigation, issued comprehensive directions to strengthen the protection, rehabilitation, and access to justice for survivors of sexual violence by enforcing existing legal obligations rather than creating new law. The Court mandated strict registration of Zero FIRs under the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, directed departmental and penal action for non-compliance, prohibited the two-finger test through statewide implementation, and ordered improvements in One-Stop Centres by addressing deficiencies in infrastructure, sanitation, drinking water, security, staffing, and monitoring. It further directed interim and final victim compensation irrespective of conviction, acquittal, or non-tracing of the accused, ensured free education up to Class XII for children born out of rape, reinforced protection of survivors’ identities, mandated training and sensitization of police and court personnel, and established monitoring mechanisms through a Special Task Force. The Court held that these measures are constitutional obligations requiring effective implementation and sustained institutional accountability.
WHEN SAFETY TAKES A BACK SEAT
“On the seashore of endless worlds children meet, trusting the tide, unaware of what moves beneath it. A school bus is meant to be that same safe shore. When it isn’t, the failure is not the children to bear.” — Rabindranath Tagore (Geetanjali)
The Karnataka High Court’s Judgement recognizes precisely this: that when the state entrusts children to a system of transport, safety cannot be a matter of chance or negligence—it is a non-negotiable extension of the shore Tagore imagined. Where that shore fails, as it did here, the law must step in not merely to compensate for the harm but to hold accountable those whose duty it was to keep the tide at bay.
There is something both reassuring and deeply troubling about a High Court having to tell the State that rape survivors deserve clean drinking water at shelter homes. Reassuring, because the judiciary stepped in. Troubling, because it had to.
On 8 June 2026, the Division Bench of the Jharkhand High Court — comprising Chief Justice M.S. Sonak and Justice Rajesh Shankar—delivered what can only be described as a comprehensive judicial indictment of the state’s chronic, systematic failure to protect and rehabilitate survivors of sexual violence. In Court on its Own Motion v State of Jharkhand, the Ranchi Bench issued a sweeping set of directions covering the mandatory registration of Zero FIRs, prohibition of the two-finger test, free education for children born out of rape, establishment of a women-headed monitoring committee for One-Stop Centres, and much else besides. The Judgement does not discover new law. It enforces existing law — a distinction that makes it simultaneously significant and sobering.
The matter originated with a petition by Ms Padma Baraik, who sought directions concerning rape and sexual assault survivors. Recognizing the question as one of larger constitutional importance, the Court took suo motu cognisance, converted the matter into a public interest litigation, and permitted Ms Baraik to assist as an intervenor while leaving her individual remedies open. Suggestions were placed by the intervenor, JHALSA, and the Amicus Curiae. What followed was a judicial reckoning with institutional failures that, as the Court noted, were not for want of law but for want of will.
Zero FIR: Mandatory, Not Discretionary—and Not Negotiable
The first and most operationally critical direction concerns the registration of a zero FIR under Section 173 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. The Court directed the Director General of Police to ensure strict compliance and to initiate penal and departmental action for non-compliance. This direction is not new law—it is the enforcement of an obligation so well-settled that its continued non-compliance is, at this point, something closer to institutional insubordination than administrative oversight.
The constitutional foundation was laid in Lalita Kumari v Government of Uttar Pradesh, where a Constitution Bench held that registration of an FIR upon receipt of information disclosing a cognizable offence is mandatory—not optional, not discretionary, not subject to the officer’s personal assessment of credibility. Section 173(1) of the BNSS has since codified this position in explicit statutory language, adding the words ‘irrespective of the area where the offence is committed’ to give Zero FIR its unambiguous legislative mandate. The jurisdictional excuse—this station is not the right one, try elsewhere— was never legally available. The BNSS has now made this plain even for those who refused to read the precedents.
And yet, the Court found that non-registration remained a live problem in Jharkhand. JHALSA and the Amicus Curiae both placed evidence of survivors being turned away or redirected at the point of first contact. Each redirect is not merely a bureaucratic inconvenience — it is a measurable delay in medical examination, a delay in forensic evidence collection, and a potential rupture in the prosecutorial timeline that can irrevocably prejudice the case. The officer who turns away a rape survivor citing jurisdictional grounds is not exercising discretion. He is violating binding law. The Court’s direction to initiate penal and departmental action converts that violation from an institutional abstraction into a personal professional consequence. This is precisely the correct approach, and it has been needed for a long time.
One-Stop Centres: The Anatomy of a Broken Promise
The findings on One-Stop Centres are, in the most precise sense, an anatomy of a broken promise—because the promise was specific, funded, and still unkept. The Court found serious deficiencies in several of Jharkhand’s OSCs, including staffing shortages, poor sanitation, non-functional kitchens, lack of drinking water, absent security, and inadequate infrastructure. These are not findings about aspirational goals. They are findings about a government-funded facility that lacks functional kitchens and drinking water for survivors of sexual violence who have been referred there for care and recovery.
OSCs were conceived under the Ministry of Women and Child Development as integrated facilities providing survivors with medical care, police assistance, legal aid, psychological counselling, and temporary shelter under one roof. The scheme exists. The funding exists. The buildings exist. What is apparently absent is anyone checking whether they actually function. The Court accordingly directed the Women and Child Development Department to rectify these deficiencies, constitute a women-headed complaints and monitoring committee, and use Nari Niketan, Ranchi as a shelter home without a rigid maximum stay period.
That last direction — the removal of a rigid cap on maximum stay — strikes at a structural misunderstanding embedded in how Indian welfare institutions approach survivor rehabilitation. A mandatory exit date operates on the implicit assumption that trauma, displacement, legal proceedings, and social rehabilitation resolve themselves within an administratively convenient window. They do not. A survivor who must vacate a shelter before her trial is concluded, before her family situation is assessed, or before she has achieved minimum economic self-sufficiency is not a rehabilitated person. She is a person who has been processed and released. The Court’s refusal to endorse such processing-as-rehabilitation reflects a clear-eyed understanding of what legal protection actually requires in practice, as opposed to on paper.
IV. The Two-Finger Test: A Prohibition Thrice Delivered
In 2013, the Supreme Court in Lillu alias Rajesh v State of Haryana held, unequivocally, that the two-finger test—which purports to examine vaginal laxity to determine whether a woman is ‘habituated to sexual intercourse’—violates the right to privacy, physical integrity, and dignity under Article 21, and has no scientific basis whatsoever. In 2022, the Supreme Court, in a case arising from Jharkhand itself—State of Jharkhand v Shailendra Kumar Rai, — reiterated the prohibition in terms leaving no conceivable room for misunderstanding: the test must not be conducted; it re-victimises and re-traumatises survivors; it is an affront to their dignity; any person conducting it will be guilty of misconduct.
That Jharkhand—the very state which was the appellant in that 2022 Supreme Court Judgement—is, in 2026, the subject of a direction to issue a circular prohibiting the test is not merely ironic. It is a data point about the relationship between judicial pronouncement and institutional compliance in India. The gap between what courts say and what hospitals do has not been bridged by two Supreme Court rulings. The High Court’s direction to circulate a blanket prohibition to all government and private hospitals converts a confirmed constitutional principle into an operationalised, communicated, actionable prohibition reaching every examining physician in the state.
The two-finger test is not a minor procedural irregularity. It is a site of deliberate secondary victimization—a moment in the justice process where a survivor seeking redress is subjected to an examination that simultaneously violates her body and impugns her credibility based on her sexual history. Its continued use communicates something precise to survivors: that the system that claims to protect them is, in part, still judging them by standards the Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional. The direction to prohibit it is not a technical correction. It is an institutional statement about who the justice system exists to serve.
V. Compensation and Rehabilitation: Beyond the Verdict
One of the most jurisprudentially significant holdings concerns the architecture of compensation. The Court directed trial courts to consider interim relief immediately upon registration of FIR, and to award final compensation irrespective of acquittal, conviction, or non-tracing of the accused, with payment within 30 days.
This direction challenges a stubborn conflation in the public — and sometimes judicial — imagination between criminal conviction and survivor entitlement. The dominant understanding is that compensation follows conviction: the state pays when it has ‘proven’ that something happened. This is constitutionally incorrect and practically devastating. A survivor’s need for medical care, psychological support, and economic rehabilitation does not arise from a verdict. It arises from what was done to her. An acquittal does not mean the survivor was not harmed; it means the prosecution could not establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt. These are entirely different propositions with entirely different implications for criminal liability on the one hand and survivor entitlement on the other.
The direction regarding children born out of rape is equally significant. The Court directed the Education Department to appoint district nodal officers, ensure free education up to Class XII for such children, and provide scholarships for meritorious students in premier institutions. Children born because of rape carry no culpability for the circumstances of their conception. They are, however, frequently subjected to the compounded disadvantages of stigma, economic precarity, and disrupted family structures. The educational entitlement directed here is not charity — it is an application of Articles 14 and 21 to every child irrespective of the circumstances of their birth. It is constitutionally unremarkable as a proposition. As a practical direction, it is long overdue.
VI. Victim Identity, Media, and the Architecture of Shame
The Court directed strict non-disclosure of victim identity by media, police, and courts. Section 72 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, has long made such disclosure a punishable offence. But statutory prohibition, as this Judgement repeatedly demonstrates, is insufficient without active enforcement and cultural change at the institutional level.
The architecture of shame surrounding sexual violence survivors in India is not a natural social phenomenon. It is, in substantial part, structurally produced through practices of disclosure—careless FIR documentation accessible to the public, media reports identifying survivors through neighbourhood and family detail, and court proceedings conducted without appropriate screening. The court’s direction that identity protection must be maintained across every institutional node—police, media, and courts—reflects a clear understanding that protection is not a single administrative act but a systemic obligation that must be enforced at every interface between the survivor and the institutions claiming to serve her.
VII. Training, Sensitisation, and the Preconditions of Access to Justice
The court directed training and sensitization of police and court personnel—a direction that may appear modest by comparison to the more dramatic prohibitions in the judgement but which is arguably the most practically foundational of all. Law enforcement’s treatment of survivors at the point of first contact shapes whether survivors continue to engage with the justice system at all.
A survivor who is asked what she was wearing, why she was out at night, why she delayed reporting, or whether she ‘consented’ has already received the message that the system is not built for her. The attrition in sexual offense cases—the extraordinary gap between crimes committed and cases reaching trial—is not solely a matter of evidentiary difficulty. It is, in substantial part, a consequence of the institutional environment. Training that addresses such responses is not an optional welfare add-on. It is a precondition for functional access to justice.
The court’s additional directions—on legal awareness programmes, self-defence training, psychological care, livelihood support, a relocation mechanism, and the designation of helpline 181 as the primary women-centric number linked to 11216—collectively address different nodes in the continuum of harm. Each reflects the same underlying recognition: justice for survivors of sexual violence is not a single event but a sustained process requiring coordinated institutional response from the point of the offence through to recovery and reintegration.
VIII. The Constitutional Framework and the Floor of State Obligation
The Court held explicitly that the State and all its instrumentalities are under a binding legal obligation to secure a coordinated, survivor-centric framework in accordance with constitutional protections. The constitutional provisions engaged—Articles 14, 15, 19, and 21—are the foundational guarantees of equality, non-discrimination, expression, and life with dignity that the Supreme Court has consistently held to encompass protection from sexual violence and from the institutional failures compounding its harm.
The Court’s clarification that its directions are not exhaustive deserves particular emphasis. The Judgement is not the ceiling of state obligation; it is the floor. The forwarding of the Judgement to all relevant authorities and the constitution of a special task force for quarterly monitoring are structural mechanisms designed to prevent these directions from joining the graveyard of well-intentioned Indian judicial orders cited at conferences and unimplemented on the ground.
IX. Conclusion: Law Exists; Compliance Remains Optional?
Court on its Own Motion v. State of Jharkhand is, at its core, a Judgement about the gap between legislative intent and institutional reality. The laws mandating zero FIR existed. The prohibition on the two-finger test existed, confirmed twice by the Supreme Court, including in a case from Jharkhand itself. The compensation frameworks existed. The identity protection provisions existed. The shelter home mandates existed. The Court did not create new law. It found, catalogued, and ordered enforcement of obligations the state had already assumed and systematically failed to meet.
This is the quiet scandal at the heart of the Judgement. India has, over decades of legislative reform and judicial intervention, built a substantial legal architecture for the protection of sexual violence survivors. What it has not built — or has built only partially, with leaking roofs and non-functional kitchens — is the institutional ecosystem required to give that architecture meaning. A law that is not enforced is not a protection. It is a promise. And in Jharkhand, as this Judgement documents in careful, damning detail, it has been a broken one.
Whether the State will comply — not performatively, through circular issuances and committee formations, but genuinely, through funded and monitored implementation — remains to be seen. The Special Task Force’s quarterly monitoring mandate is the mechanism through which the Court intends to find out. If past compliance history with judicial directions in sexual violence matters offers any guide, optimism must be tempered with vigilance.
But the Judgement has, at minimum, removed the State’s ability to plead ignorance. It knows what it must do. It has been told in detail across nine categories of direction by a court of law exactly what survivor justice requires. The survivors of Jharkhand and the children born of violence who now have a judicially recognised right to education deserve nothing less than full compliance. That a High Court order was necessary to arrive at this point is the real measure of how far institutional India still must go.
The views expressed are personal.
REFERENCES:
- Court on its Own Motion v State of Jharkhand, WP (PIL) No. 8 of 2026, Jharkhand High Court, Judgement dated 8 June 2026 (Sonak CJ and Shankar J).
- Lalita Kumari v Government of Uttar Pradesh(2014) 2 SCC 1.
- Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita 2023, s.
- Lillu alias Rajesh v State of Haryana(2013) 14 SCC 643.
- State of Jharkhand v Shailendra Kumar Rai(2022) 8 SCC 149.
Authors: Abhisikta Nandy, B.A.LL.B (IPR Hons.) || Advocate Y.Balachander Reddy, LL.M Intellectual Property Rights, (LL.M. Corporate and Securities Laws), P.G. College of Law, O.U., Basheerbagh
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