Four men convicted of gang-raping and murdering a young Delhi woman, who came to be known as Nirbhaya, were hanged in pre-dawn darkness on March 20.

Mukesh Singh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31) were executed at 5.30 am in Tihar Jail.

This is the first time that four men have been hanged together in Tihar Jail, South Asia’s largest prison complex that houses more than 16,000 inmates.

Nirbhaya was raped and brutalised by six men, including a juvenile at the time, in an empty bus that was driven through the streets of the national capital in December 2012. They then dumped her on the road and left her for dead. Her friend who was with her was also severely beaten and thrown out along with her.

She died in a Singapore hospital after battling for her life for a fortnight.

Of the six, Ram Singh allegedly committed suicide in Tihar Jail days after the trial began, and the juvenile was released in 2015 after spending three years in a correctional home.

As the horrific chapter - which led to a tougher anti-rape law - in India’s long history of assault ended, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said justice had prevailed. It was of the utmost importance to ensure the dignity and safety of women, he said.

720 executions since 1947

India has carried out at least 720 executions since Independence, nearly half of them in Uttar Pradesh, according to data collated under a project of the National Law University in New Delhi.

The actual number could be much higher, a project official said, as there are no proper records maintained by the government on executions.

Before the hanging of the four convicts in the Nirbhaya case, Yakub Menon was the last person to be sent to the gallows in July 2015.

According to the Project 39A data, 354 executions were carried out in Uttar Pradesh since Independence, followed by 90 in Haryana, 73 in Madhya Pradesh, 57 in Maharashtra, 36 in Karnataka, 30 in West Bengal, 27 in Andhra Pradesh, 24 in Delhi, and 10 in Punjab. Eight deaths by execution were recorded in Rajasthan, five each in Odisha and Jammu & Kashmir, and one in Goa, it added.

Anup Surendranath, executive director of Project 39A, said the figures gathered by them are based on records shared by states under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, while the actual number could be much higher.

“Collecting data on executions is difficult as there are no proper records maintained by the government. Our data is based on information procured through RTIs and the actual number could be in thousands but we do not have any record for that,” he said.

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