Renuka Shinde and Seema Gavit

INDIA: TWO SISTERS MAY BECOME FIRST EVER WOMEN TO BE HANGED IN THE COUNTRY

August 14, 2014: the Mumbai Mirror said two sisters from Kolhapur in Maharashtra State, who were sentenced to death in 2001 for kidnapping 13 children and killing nine of them, are likely to become the first ever women in India to be hanged after President Pranab Mukherjee rejected their mercy pleas late July.
Renuka Kiran Shinde and Seema Mohan Gavit, who partnered their mother Anjanabai Gavit to kidnap the kids and push them into begging and killed some of them after they stopped being productive, are currently lodged on death row at the Yerwada jail in Pune. Anjanabai passed away during the trial, and the sisters’ father Kiran Shinde turned approver and was acquitted.
Desk officer Deepak Jadiye of the home department said no objections have been received yet on the Kolapur sisters’ hanging. “We have informed the two convicts, their relatives, the legal remedial cells of the Supreme Court and also the district court about the rejection (of their mercy plea),’’ he said. The number of people executed in India since Independence is a matter of dispute. Government statistics claim that only 52 people have been executed since independence. However, research by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties indicates that the actual number of executions is in fact much higher, as they have located records of 1,422 executions in the decade from 1953 to 1963 alone. However, there is no record of any woman’s execution. (Sources: www.mumbaimirror.com, 14/08/2014))