India's own crime-data tables show conviction rates for caste-atrocity cases barely moving in years — the real bottleneck sits far past the police station, in a court system that decides only a sliver of a fast-growing backlog.
The government told Parliament 332 people have died in sewers and septic tanks since January 2021. A civil-society group counting the same years puts the number at 593. Neither figure is fabricated. They disagree because they are not measuring the same thing — and the gap between them is where the dead who don't officially exist are.