Suryansh Singh & Aryan Garg, Institute of Law, Nirma University
Introduction
Victim is defined under Section 2(wa) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (hereinafter CrPC), it defines victim as someone who has suffered any loss or injury which has been caused by act or omission for which the accused person has been charged, the expression “victim” will also include his or guardian or legal heir.1 Furthermore, Section 357A of the CrPC directs every State Government to come up with their own victim compensation scheme in coordination with the Central Government.2 The object of this victim handbook is therefore to look into the rights of the victim in terms of grant of compensation. This victim handbook focuses on the status of victim compensation schemes in two states of India, Gujarat and Bihar. We began by inquiring into the Central Victim Compensation Fund where we looked into the objective and eligibility criteria provided and how it facilitates the State Governments in formulating their respective compensation schemes. While inquiring into the victim compensation scheme of both the states we looked into the mechanism of victim compensation and kinds of victims eligible for compensation in both the states. Subsequently, we moved into inquiring whether any separate class of victim is classified by the legislation of the states or not, for example we tried to find out whether in Gujarat the Godhra riots victims have been categorized as a special class of victim or not. Then we moved on to analyze the range of compensation provided in different compensation schemes, here we tried to look into the uniformity in compensating a victim of a specific crime and in case of any non-uniformity the reason for the same.
