Ojas Sharma*
Introduction
In 2020, Mohd Shahnawaz made history as the first male acid attack survivor to receive compensation in Uttar Pradesh. However, this victory was met with a bittersweet response. He was three years old when someone threw acid on him, leaving him with several disabilities and partial blindness. After a long struggle of 27 years, he received five lakhs as compensation. This gives us a peek into how the system works for acid attack survivors when compounded with gender based administrative gaps.
Moving from mere criminalisation to adopting a more holistic approach, the jurisprudence dealing with acid attacks has experienced a major shift over the past decade. The Supreme Court in Laxmi v. Union of India recognised acid attacks as a violation of human dignity, mandating minimum ₹3 lakh compensation and free medical treatment. This was followed by Parivartan Kendra v. Union of India, where the court clarified that the ₹3 lakh figure is only a minimum, and the compensation must account for long-term factors such as medical expenses, loss of employability, social stigma and rehabilitation.
While such judgements have rightfully acknowledged the gendered nature of acid violence, disproportionately impacting women, they have also exposed a major loophole. This gap not merely in the policy, but has a societal dimension as well. While the compensation and rehabilitation schemes have expanded their institutional support for female survivors by a major leap, they have unconsciously created a blind spot for male victims who remain outside of such structured channels for post-crime relief. Therefore, the plight of the male survivors of such heinous crimes is ignored.
Acid Attack Laws: Strong On Paper, Weak in Enforcement
A closer scrutiny of the national data makes this gap between law and enforcement more evident. One of the major concerns has been the speed of judicial response, and unfortunately, the numbers speak for themselves. According to the NCRB’s Crime in India 2023 report, 735 cases are reported to be under trial, out of which 649 were carried over from the previous year, while only 86 were newly sent to trial in 2023. Independent organisations such as Chhanv Foundation and Acid Survivors Trust International (ASTI) have reported 80-85% of the registered victims as females, leaving a significant 15–20% of cases involving male victims, a figure likely to be underreported due to deep-seated stigma and social silence surrounding male victimhood.
The law is not without recourse. It has strictly codified the offence under Section 124 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), under which medical fines alongside severe punishments up to life imprisonment are prescribed. Despite such stringent punishments, this framework suffers from a narrow, medico-centric interpretation of harm. It has failed to account for the “social death“ that follows an attack. Social death means permanent alteration of a survivor’s life trajectory coupled with erosion of mental health and high risk of unemployability, which cannot be remedied by mere payment of compensation or medical bills alone. Furthermore, despite the gender-neutral application of the provision, the post-crime relief mechanisms are fragmented in nature, where rehabilitation is rationed by the identity of the victim rather than the quantum of harm suffered.
This scale of regulatory failure at the trial stage is evidenced by NCRB’s own Crime in India data (2021). At a national level, trials were concluded in only 26 acid attack cases, while 1,078 cases remained pending, resulting in a pendency rate of 97.1% and a conviction rate of just 30.8%. Unfortunately, this gap is not just confined to the trial stage; it is present in the compensation architecture itself. The general instruments, such as the ₹200 crore Central Victim Compensation Fund and Section 396 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), have gender-neutral application. However, the operational layer built on top of these schemes defaults to a focus on women. The Ministry of Home Affairs’ 2016 advisory on expediting cases of acid attack was issued specifically for women. In addition to this, NALSA’s 2018 Compensation scheme was designed explicitly for “women victims/Survivors of sexual assault/other crimes”. No parallel mechanism was extended to male survivors. Thus, while the statutory design is neutral, the implementation is not.
Such an asymmetry is prevalent across all parallel channels of institutional support. Channels like the One Stop Centre, Nirbhaya Fund disbursement, and district-level welfare cells provide parallel support exclusively for women survivors, operating independently, irrespective of trial outcome. The same doesn’t extend to male victims. Their access remains conditional on ad hoc judicial intervention and is delayed for years. Though administrative passivity delays justice to all survivors equally, the non-existence of equal inclusion in parallel channels creates more hindrance for male survivors.
The Silence Behind the Statistics
The true scale of the problem is often underestimated by looking only at the 15–20% figure. Stigma around male survivors of violence in India is a result of a socially constructed mechanism where masculinity is defined as emotional toughness, and therefore, acknowledging victimhood is experienced as a loss of manhood itself and not just a physical injury. Such patriarchal ideas linked to toxic masculinity leave little room for victims to be recognised. This is not just a cultural narrative but is also evidenced by empirical data. It was found by a 2025 study on masculine norms and help-seeking among Indian men that adherence to such norms creates a cloak of self-stigmatisation around seeking help, which results in a significant reduction in help-seeking attitudes and increased suppression of disclosure. Emotional suppression and self-silencing are documented as a default response to victimhood by men in another related study. Such gender norms prevent survivors from getting help or even acknowledging their plight.
These social dynamics compound an already broken system, where survivors are not only met with the medical and economic aftermath but are also forced to comply with a social script that offers them no space or direction to seek help without further “unmanning themselves”. They are enveloped in a cloak of double invisibility, where the law does not architect a route for them and social norms act as an impediment to creating one. This explains why the few male survivors who do receive compensation, like Mohd Shahnawaz, tend to do so only after decades of individual persistence rather than institutional access, because the system was never designed to find them. This is not unique to Shahnawaz. As a matter of practice, female survivors are routinely covered under victim compensation schemes, while male survivors are frequently excluded from the compensation altogether, despite the Laxmi judgement applying to them equally.
When Rehabilitation Ends at Gender
This flawed policy architecture is a result of exclusion and not of hostile intent, with most rehabilitation efforts for violence victims in India designed with a special focus on gender. Article 15(3) of the Constitution permits the State to make special provisions for the welfare of women and children. Courts have consistently upheld the validity of such provisions where they are meant to serve a legitimate protective purpose. Article 14 itself does not prohibit classification; it prohibits arbitrary classification. The test to differentiate between the same was laid down in State of West Bengal v. Anwar Ali Sarkar, where it was held that a classification is valid so long as it rests on an intelligible differentia bearing a rational nexus to the object of the law. With that being said, gender-focused welfare schemes are not unconstitutional in nature; however, this differentiation becomes problematic when the differentia and objective take a different course. Article 15(3) allows for gender-based classification in cases where the problem is closely linked to gender, such as maternity benefits or sexual and domestic violence. Therefore, in those situations, treating one gender differently is justified because they are disproportionately affected in regard to the other gender. This reasoning, unfortunately, doesn’t sit well in the case of an acid attack. The reason being, although women are attacked more often, the injuries that are caused are the same regardless of gender. This means that while such gender conscious measures may be justified to prevent such violence, it loses its justification at the stage of rehabilitation. At that stage, what matters is the severity of the injury and not the survivor’s gender.
This was reinforced by the Supreme Court’s own reasoning in Parivartan Kendra v. Union of India, where the Court held that compensation must account for long-term factors including employability and social stigma, centring the harm rather than the identity of the survivor. Confining institutional delivery to female survivors alone cannot fulfil the requirements of Article 14.
Where a child was attacked because his mother refused sexual demands, also known as the Aditya Raj case, or where two brothers were killed in an acid attack motivated by extortion, it is crystal clear that such violence is instrumentalised across varied contexts of power and coercion and cannot be exclusively boxed as a gendered conflict. The constitutional failure is therefore not in the existence of gendered schemes, but in the absence of an offence-based trigger that would extend similar access to all survivors.
Policy Way Forward: From Gendered Welfare To Offence-Based Rehabilitation
The issue does not lie in the nonexistence of a rehabilitation framework, but rather in the absence of offence-based access points for male acid attack survivors. Where access to compensation and long-term support is shaped not by the harm suffered but by the gender-centric channels, leaving welfare structurally out of reach for those outside them.
Victim compensation under Section 396 of BNSS already exists, but it lags in extending support to male survivors in practice due to a lack of institutional coordination. Despite formal recognition within victim compensation schemes, the absence of an offence-specific administrative trigger results in uneven and delayed access. Survivors are routinely denied free medical treatments, forced to arrange private care or compelled to approach courts pleading for benefits that are otherwise guaranteed. This underperformance is not a deficit in legal design, but one in enforceability and institutional accountability.
To remedy this, more emphasis must be placed on administrative reorientation. Mandatory standard operating procedures (SOPS) must be jointly issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and the Ministry of Women and Child Development, mandating that registration of an FIR under Section 124 of the BNS must automatically trigger a DLSA referral within 48 hours. This must initiate a Section 396 BNSS compensation assessment by the trial court and guarantee immediate, free medical treatment without requiring a formal petition from the survivor. In addition to this, the eligibility criterion of One Stop Centres must simply be refined from “women affected by violence“ to “survivors of offences”.
With that being said, the law already recognises structured rehabilitation for male victims; the mechanisms already exist. What is missing is an institutional trigger that converts recognition into relief. India’s acid attack jurisprudence has spent a decade expanding the meaning of dignity for survivors. It is time the institutional machinery expanded with it.
* The author is a is a second-year law student at the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi. The author may be contacted at ojas4@ilc.du.ac.in.