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BANGALORE, INDIA, August 23, 2002: Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley and fastest growing city, was once a safe haven for women. While women are no longer safe on the streets of the city, now they are often not safe within their own homes, too. Domestic harassment is on the rise and 100 women on an average are said to die in Bangalore of unnatural causes every month. Many of these cases are attributed to dowry harassment. The Sampath family is still mourning the death of their daughter. They say she was murdered by her doctor husband and his parents over demands for more dowry. “We got her married on April 20, 2000. She gave birth to a child on January 8, 2001, and January 20, 2002, they murdered her,” says her father Ramamurthy Sampath. A well-documented study by Vimochana, a woman’s organization in Bangalore, on the number of unnatural deaths of married women between the ages of 18 and 40 in the city, revealed disturbing statistics. The study showed that 786 married women died unnatural deaths in Bangalore in 1999. the number of such deaths was 714 in 2000 and 660 last year. A visit to the burn ward in the city’s public hospital shows that in most cases the victims attribute their burn injuries to “stove bursts” while actually in most cases they have simply been set on fire.

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