A green tongue of water winds through Kalla Dhey, a patchwork of mud-walled houses and small fields in Karauli district in India’s northern Rajasthan state. The water, covered with algae, separates a few unlucky households from the rest of Karauli. During the monsoon, the green water rises, and the inhabitants are marooned on their temporary island, cut off for weeks at a time. Not long ago, residents say, a woman in labor had to be ferried in an inner tube to the other shore to get to a road that leads to the hospital. During the dry season, a flimsy bridge of matted grass over the low river links Kalla Dhey to the rest of Karauli. In recent weeks, an unprecedented number of visitors have made their way over that bridge and along the dusty footpaths, past the sunlit fields of yellow mustard flowers and the faraway sound of kids at play. On a dirt outcropping stands a mud-walled shack with a sagging roof, windows covered in tarp when nobody’s home. It’s not much different than any other house around it, except for the strangers who keep knocking at its door, and the fact that two of the men who grew up here—brothers—have been accused of perpetrating one of the most heinous crimes in the history of modern India. (MORE: Another Outrage: Delhi Bus Rape Suspect Found Dead) One of the brothers was Ram Singh, a bus driver who was found hanged in his cell in New Delhi in the early morning of March 11. Singh, 34, was being held in the capital’s Tihar Jail for his alleged role in the brutal rape that occurred on Dec. 16, when a 23-year-old woman walked out of a mall in the Indian capital with her friend, a 28-year-old man, after watching Life of Pi. Five of the six men charged with the rape and the murder that followed—the young woman died less than two weeks later—have been on trial since January. The sixth suspect is being charged and tried separately as a juvenile; all had pleaded not guilty. With Singh’s death, part of that case is closed, and, if he were guilty, he can no longer be brought to justice. But his story remains a parable about how violence, sexism, inequity and a lack of law and order intersected in India that Dec. 16 night—and a harbinger of what could yet happen again. THE RAPE

Once the couple left the mall, they ended up at a bus stop, where a white bus with yellow curtains pulled up and a young man inside called out that the bus was going their way. They climbed aboard, and at 9.24 p.m., according to police documents, the bus started moving. Over the next half hour, the woman and man were robbed, stripped and assaulted by the six males on board as the bus meandered through streets of an affluent area of India’s capital, passing cars, homes and pedestrians. The man was beaten, and the woman, a student, was raped multiple times, including with two metal rods that ripped apart her intestines. Both victims were thrown out, naked and bleeding, of the moving bus on an empty overpass. At 10:21 p.m., the New Delhi police received a call about two people bleeding on the street. The crime sparked massive, nationwide protests for weeks, with men and women flooding India’s streets to demand swift justice for the young woman who fought her attackers fiercely, and for an overhaul to a legal system that has allowed violence against women all too often to go unpunished. A special fast-track court was set up for the case. In keeping with Indian law regarding rape cases, the trial has been closed to the media, and the two victims have not been identified by name by most Indian media outlets. That six individuals allegedly conspired in this brutal crime, and that these extremely violent sexual assaults happen with alarming regularity across India, have raised unsettling questions about the underlying attitudes in India of men toward women. In 2011 more than 24,000 rapes were documented—one every 20 minutes. In New Delhi alone, of more than 600 cases filed last year, just one resulted in a conviction. But the Dec. 16 atrocity is more than another depressing statistic. It has spotlighted how weak law enforcement and a creaky legal system have create space for a sense of impunity to fester, and it indirectly exposes the plight of legions of people in urban India who don’t have access to the same opportunities or protection as the elite. The sustained outrage over Dec. 16 has many Indians holding out hope – however fragile – there is no going back. “We can’t be more desensitized than we have been over the years,” says Ranjana Kumari, director of the Center for Social Research, a think tank in New Delhi. “Things have to improve. This is the beginning of a change.” MORE: Should the Indian Gang-Rape Victim Remain Anonymous? THE ACCUSED

That’s easy to say from the capital. It’s hard to imagine things changing in Kalla Dhey, the kind of nowhere place that tends to drift off the radar of politicians between election campaigns. In a good moment, the warm sun and hum of insects paint a bucolic picture, obscuring the daily grind of farmers who are barely able to earn enough rupees to eat. In a bad moment, every person seems gripped by resignation over the failure of the Indian state to include hundreds of millions of citizens in its breathless race to the top. Ram Singh, slim, mustachioed, with a receding hairline, was the registered driver of the white bus and the first suspect arrested. He spent the first years of his life in Kalla Dhey. Extended family members next door remember him and his younger 26-year-old brother Mukesh—who told police that he was on the bus with Singh that night—working hard as young boys. “There is no school here, no education,” says Bhom Pal, a 45-year-old cousin. “[Ram and Mukesh] were working in the field and selling firewood in the market. They would use some of the money they made to buy things.” Their uncle, Gyar Sa, who lives with Pal, remembers that the family didn’t seem close. “There were no bad feelings,” he says, “But they all kept to themselves.” (PHOTOS: In India, a Rape Sparks Violent Protests and Demands for Justice) That Singh left this place before he was a teenager, moving to New Delhi with his mother and stepfather, was hardly rare. Many households around here are only occasionally occupied, their residents living part- or full-time in New Delhi or other cities, where they earn more money. “There’s no work here,” says Jag Mohan Mali, 52, a neighbor who lives on the other side of the river. “People have to fill up their stomachs. They have to leave.” It’s a problem throughout Karauli, says Meera Kushna, an official in the district: “All the kids who want to better themselves have to go. It’s very hard to do what they do. Sometimes they get work. Sometimes they don’t, and they come back empty-handed.” After the Singh family arrived in the capital, hundreds of miles away from their fields, they settled into a small house tucked in a corner of Ravidas colony, an informal pocket of mostly migrant workers in south New Delhi. Like most of the people living in Ravidas, Ram Singh’s stepfather found work in New Delhi as a day laborer, before he eventually left and went back to Karauli with his wife. More people migrate to Delhi than to any other city in India, according to the Indian Institute of Human Settlement. Though poverty rates are relatively low compared to other parts of the country, the millions of new arrivals have created a severe housing crunch that has left many workers living on the streets, or without basic services in informal settlements like Ravidas. Dipanker Gupta, a sociologist in New Delhi, says the yawning gap between the city’s haves and almost-haves has contributed to a rising crime rate. “It is people who are not quite poor, not quite well off, but who have some access to urban life—they know how to drive a bus, for example—who [get involved in crime],” says Gupta. “They can touch [a different life], but they can’t grasp [it].” Madhu Purnima Kishwar, an academic and writer based in New Delhi, says places like Ravidas forge “rudderless” and “brutalized” young men who are products of a weak education system and a failure to lift up rural livelihoods. “It’s not just a case of the law failing; it’s the policies,” says Kishwar. “You have to look at the inner health of your society. They are also victims.” According to neighbors and extended family, Singh came and went from Ravidas repeatedly over several years. Says Kamla, a neighbor who, like many in India, goes by one name: “He was always tense and angry. He never spoke to anybody. He just kept to himself.” She says she regularly saw Singh returning home drunk, or looking as if he had just been in a fight. And while she kept her distance, she says, “If we knew [he and Mukesh] were up to something like [the rape], we never would have let them stay here.” Nobody, of course, knew what lay ahead. In fact, not just the brothers were members of the small Ravidas community. Two others charged with the rape and murder also lived in its narrow lanes. MORE: India’s Gang-Rape Case: As Accused Go to Court, Unease Settles over Delhi THE REACTION

As the gruesome details of the crime emerged late last year, a collective question emerged across India: how did we let things get this bad? A government-appointed committee headed by former Supreme Court Chief Justice J.S. Verma has recommended stricter punishment for crimes like gang rape, sexual harassment and acid attacks on women. The Verma Commission also proposed that marital rape and stalking be made criminal offenses, and that members of the armed forces accused of sexual assault be subject to civilian, not military, law. In early February, some of these recommendations were signed into a temporary new law that, among other things, allows for capital punishment in rapes that result in death or leave a victim in a vegetative state. Changing people’s deeply entrenched distrust of the police will be harder. Underreporting of crimes of sexual violence is believed to be widespread, due both to their social stigma and the belief that the police won’t do anything. Part of the problem is how they’re deployed. Police nationwide are disproportionately assigned to protect high-profile government officials. The more fundamental issue is public mistrust. The widespread perception of Indian police is that “corruption is rampant” and they have a “tendency to exploit,” P.P. Rao, a senior advocate in the Supreme Court, said during a recent conference on police reforms in New Delhi. “Nobody wants to go to a police station if they can help it,” says Gupta, the sociologist. “That is why these crimes go unpunished and give criminals the confidence they can get away with it.” (MORE: New Delhi: What Does It Take to Make a City, and Society, Safe?) THE IMBALANCE

Another factor is changing gender roles in a traditionally patriarchal society. Currently, just 39.5% of women in India are active in the workforce, compared to 82% in China. If the nation’s slowing economy is going to make a sustainable recovery, it will need women to join in, as will the multinationals looking to do ever more business here, and families struggling to make ends meet. By all accounts, the Dec. 16 rape victim was just the kind of ambitious, driven young woman whom India needs. She was studying to be a physiotherapist and had promised her hard-working parents a better life when she made it to the top, or at least to the middle. Though the number of working women has been dropping, the number of female-headed households is rising, mostly in rural areas where more and more men are leaving to earn money in the cities. The women are rightly insisting on a say in how things get done. That’s a change that has not sat well with many men, who end up feeling pushed to the side as women take a more central role. “Now that women are doing things—and demanding certain things as rights—men are getting angry and upset,” says Gupta. Hundreds of millions of Indian men defy the misogynistic stereotype, of course. Men were also a driving force of the protests that erupted after the attack, just as outraged as the women they stood shoulder to shoulder with.Even men who prescribe to conservative, patriarchal thinking can’t be typecast: a man that won’t permit his wife to leave the house may very well send all his daughters to school. “There is no one way in which men perceive women in India,” says Kishwar. The right of people of all ideologies to live as they see fit is part of the DNA of this country, she says, but it’s the government’s job to make sure they co-exist under the law: “You have to accept this diversity and engage with it.” MORE: Brutal New Delhi Gang Rape Outrages Indians, Spurs Calls for Action THE CASE

When police found Ram Singh on the afternoon of Dec. 17, the day after the rape, he was sitting in the bus, parked outside Ravidas, according to police documents. On another afternoon, he might have been driving students to and from the school that contracted the bus out. On that day, the bus was still damp inside, apparently having just been washed out. Singh tried to flee the cops as they approached, but he was, in their words, “overpowered and apprehended.” He was a wearing a green and black T-shirt with a torn collar that was spotted with blood, along with his plastic sandals. According to police, “on sustained interrogation,” he confessed to his involvement in the gang rape the night before, and went to identify all of his alleged co-conspirators in the crime. The report says Singh admitted to trying to run over the victims with the bus after he and the others threw them out, in order to protect their identities. It says he also admitted to using the victims’ clothes to wipe flesh and blood out of the inside of the bus, and then lighting them in a fire, around which “a few persons of the locality had gathered to warm their hands.” Why had they done it? According to police, Singh and the co-accused say they did it for fun—“to pick up a female passenger to have sex and make merry.” (MORE: India’s Shame) Indians may now never know what Singh did that day. Officials told Indian media that sometime between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. on March 11, he hanged himself in his cell. V.K. Anand, the defense lawyer hired by Singh’s family to represent the brothers, says he doesn’t see how Singh could have killed himself in a crowded, high-security cell, and suspects foul play. Singh’s parents, in New Delhi at the time, have also expressed doubts about how their son died and was treated during his incarceration. Interior Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde called the death a “major lapse” in security. He said that while preliminary findings suggested suicide, the government had also launched a formal inquiry into his death. Will Dec. 16 indeed herald lasting change? As the weeks tick by, and the headlines about rape around the country have begun falling off the front pages, some Indians are dubious. “Tipping points only happen over glasses of single-malt whisky in the drawing rooms of Delhi,” says Ajay Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi. “There are no real tipping points in India … There is no bottom to how far we can we go down.” And yet. Shortly after the atrocity in New Delhi, a girl was also subject to a brutal gang rape—in Ram Singh’s Karauli district, where the crime is common. What was uncommon was that the girl’s assailants were arrested. The family of the Dec. 16 victim deserves closure. But perhaps the wider justice is an India where no one—whether they lead a hardscrabble existence in a slum or are quietly heading home at night—slides off the map. —With reporting by Nilanjana Bhowmick / New Delhi and Srikant Tripathy / Karauli

MORE: One Billion Rising: An End to Violence Against Women

A green tongue of water winds through Kalla Dhey, a patchwork of mud-walled houses and small fields in Karauli district in India’s northern Rajasthan state. The water, covered with algae, separates a few unlucky households from the rest of Karauli. During the monsoon, the green water rises, and the inhabitants are marooned on their temporary island, cut off for weeks at a time. Not long ago, residents say, a woman in labor had to be ferried in an inner tube to the other shore to get to a road that leads to the hospital.

During the dry season, a flimsy bridge of matted grass over the low river links Kalla Dhey to the rest of Karauli. In recent weeks, an unprecedented number of visitors have made their way over that bridge and along the dusty footpaths, past the sunlit fields of yellow mustard flowers and the faraway sound of kids at play. On a dirt outcropping stands a mud-walled shack with a sagging roof, windows covered in tarp when nobody’s home. It’s not much different than any other house around it, except for the strangers who keep knocking at its door, and the fact that two of the men who grew up here—brothers—have been accused of perpetrating one of the most heinous crimes in the history of modern India.

(MORE: Another Outrage: Delhi Bus Rape Suspect Found Dead)

One of the brothers was Ram Singh, a bus driver who was found hanged in his cell in New Delhi in the early morning of March 11. Singh, 34, was being held in the capital’s Tihar Jail for his alleged role in the brutal rape that occurred on Dec. 16, when a 23-year-old woman walked out of a mall in the Indian capital with her friend, a 28-year-old man, after watching Life of Pi. Five of the six men charged with the rape and the murder that followed—the young woman died less than two weeks later—have been on trial since January. The sixth suspect is being charged and tried separately as a juvenile; all had pleaded not guilty. With Singh’s death, part of that case is closed, and, if he were guilty, he can no longer be brought to justice. But his story remains a parable about how violence, sexism, inequity and a lack of law and order intersected in India that Dec. 16 night—and a harbinger of what could yet happen again.

THE RAPE

Once the couple left the mall, they ended up at a bus stop, where a white bus with yellow curtains pulled up and a young man inside called out that the bus was going their way. They climbed aboard, and at 9.24 p.m., according to police documents, the bus started moving. Over the next half hour, the woman and man were robbed, stripped and assaulted by the six males on board as the bus meandered through streets of an affluent area of India’s capital, passing cars, homes and pedestrians. The man was beaten, and the woman, a student, was raped multiple times, including with two metal rods that ripped apart her intestines. Both victims were thrown out, naked and bleeding, of the moving bus on an empty overpass. At 10:21 p.m., the New Delhi police received a call about two people bleeding on the street.

The crime sparked massive, nationwide protests for weeks, with men and women flooding India’s streets to demand swift justice for the young woman who fought her attackers fiercely, and for an overhaul to a legal system that has allowed violence against women all too often to go unpunished. A special fast-track court was set up for the case. In keeping with Indian law regarding rape cases, the trial has been closed to the media, and the two victims have not been identified by name by most Indian media outlets.

That six individuals allegedly conspired in this brutal crime, and that these extremely violent sexual assaults happen with alarming regularity across India, have raised unsettling questions about the underlying attitudes in India of men toward women. In 2011 more than 24,000 rapes were documented—one every 20 minutes. In New Delhi alone, of more than 600 cases filed last year, just one resulted in a conviction. But the Dec. 16 atrocity is more than another depressing statistic. It has spotlighted how weak law enforcement and a creaky legal system have create space for a sense of impunity to fester, and it indirectly exposes the plight of legions of people in urban India who don’t have access to the same opportunities or protection as the elite. The sustained outrage over Dec. 16 has many Indians holding out hope – however fragile – there is no going back. “We can’t be more desensitized than we have been over the years,” says Ranjana Kumari, director of the Center for Social Research, a think tank in New Delhi. “Things have to improve. This is the beginning of a change.”

MORE: Should the Indian Gang-Rape Victim Remain Anonymous?

THE ACCUSED

That’s easy to say from the capital. It’s hard to imagine things changing in Kalla Dhey, the kind of nowhere place that tends to drift off the radar of politicians between election campaigns. In a good moment, the warm sun and hum of insects paint a bucolic picture, obscuring the daily grind of farmers who are barely able to earn enough rupees to eat. In a bad moment, every person seems gripped by resignation over the failure of the Indian state to include hundreds of millions of citizens in its breathless race to the top.

Ram Singh, slim, mustachioed, with a receding hairline, was the registered driver of the white bus and the first suspect arrested. He spent the first years of his life in Kalla Dhey. Extended family members next door remember him and his younger 26-year-old brother Mukesh—who told police that he was on the bus with Singh that night—working hard as young boys. “There is no school here, no education,” says Bhom Pal, a 45-year-old cousin. “[Ram and Mukesh] were working in the field and selling firewood in the market. They would use some of the money they made to buy things.” Their uncle, Gyar Sa, who lives with Pal, remembers that the family didn’t seem close. “There were no bad feelings,” he says, “But they all kept to themselves.”

(PHOTOS: In India, a Rape Sparks Violent Protests and Demands for Justice)

That Singh left this place before he was a teenager, moving to New Delhi with his mother and stepfather, was hardly rare. Many households around here are only occasionally occupied, their residents living part- or full-time in New Delhi or other cities, where they earn more money. “There’s no work here,” says Jag Mohan Mali, 52, a neighbor who lives on the other side of the river. “People have to fill up their stomachs. They have to leave.” It’s a problem throughout Karauli, says Meera Kushna, an official in the district: “All the kids who want to better themselves have to go. It’s very hard to do what they do. Sometimes they get work. Sometimes they don’t, and they come back empty-handed.” After the Singh family arrived in the capital, hundreds of miles away from their fields, they settled into a small house tucked in a corner of Ravidas colony, an informal pocket of mostly migrant workers in south New Delhi. Like most of the people living in Ravidas, Ram Singh’s stepfather found work in New Delhi as a day laborer, before he eventually left and went back to Karauli with his wife.

More people migrate to Delhi than to any other city in India, according to the Indian Institute of Human Settlement. Though poverty rates are relatively low compared to other parts of the country, the millions of new arrivals have created a severe housing crunch that has left many workers living on the streets, or without basic services in informal settlements like Ravidas. Dipanker Gupta, a sociologist in New Delhi, says the yawning gap between the city’s haves and almost-haves has contributed to a rising crime rate. “It is people who are not quite poor, not quite well off, but who have some access to urban life—they know how to drive a bus, for example—who [get involved in crime],” says Gupta. “They can touch [a different life], but they can’t grasp [it].” Madhu Purnima Kishwar, an academic and writer based in New Delhi, says places like Ravidas forge “rudderless” and “brutalized” young men who are products of a weak education system and a failure to lift up rural livelihoods. “It’s not just a case of the law failing; it’s the policies,” says Kishwar. “You have to look at the inner health of your society. They are also victims.”

According to neighbors and extended family, Singh came and went from Ravidas repeatedly over several years. Says Kamla, a neighbor who, like many in India, goes by one name: “He was always tense and angry. He never spoke to anybody. He just kept to himself.” She says she regularly saw Singh returning home drunk, or looking as if he had just been in a fight. And while she kept her distance, she says, “If we knew [he and Mukesh] were up to something like [the rape], we never would have let them stay here.” Nobody, of course, knew what lay ahead. In fact, not just the brothers were members of the small Ravidas community. Two others charged with the rape and murder also lived in its narrow lanes.

MORE: India’s Gang-Rape Case: As Accused Go to Court, Unease Settles over Delhi

THE REACTION

As the gruesome details of the crime emerged late last year, a collective question emerged across India: how did we let things get this bad? A government-appointed committee headed by former Supreme Court Chief Justice J.S. Verma has recommended stricter punishment for crimes like gang rape, sexual harassment and acid attacks on women. The Verma Commission also proposed that marital rape and stalking be made criminal offenses, and that members of the armed forces accused of sexual assault be subject to civilian, not military, law. In early February, some of these recommendations were signed into a temporary new law that, among other things, allows for capital punishment in rapes that result in death or leave a victim in a vegetative state.

Changing people’s deeply entrenched distrust of the police will be harder. Underreporting of crimes of sexual violence is believed to be widespread, due both to their social stigma and the belief that the police won’t do anything. Part of the problem is how they’re deployed. Police nationwide are disproportionately assigned to protect high-profile government officials. The more fundamental issue is public mistrust. The widespread perception of Indian police is that “corruption is rampant” and they have a “tendency to exploit,” P.P. Rao, a senior advocate in the Supreme Court, said during a recent conference on police reforms in New Delhi. “Nobody wants to go to a police station if they can help it,” says Gupta, the sociologist. “That is why these crimes go unpunished and give criminals the confidence they can get away with it.”

(MORE: New Delhi: What Does It Take to Make a City, and Society, Safe?)

THE IMBALANCE

Another factor is changing gender roles in a traditionally patriarchal society. Currently, just 39.5% of women in India are active in the workforce, compared to 82% in China. If the nation’s slowing economy is going to make a sustainable recovery, it will need women to join in, as will the multinationals looking to do ever more business here, and families struggling to make ends meet. By all accounts, the Dec. 16 rape victim was just the kind of ambitious, driven young woman whom India needs. She was studying to be a physiotherapist and had promised her hard-working parents a better life when she made it to the top, or at least to the middle. Though the number of working women has been dropping, the number of female-headed households is rising, mostly in rural areas where more and more men are leaving to earn money in the cities. The women are rightly insisting on a say in how things get done. That’s a change that has not sat well with many men, who end up feeling pushed to the side as women take a more central role. “Now that women are doing things—and demanding certain things as rights—men are getting angry and upset,” says Gupta.

Hundreds of millions of Indian men defy the misogynistic stereotype, of course. Men were also a driving force of the protests that erupted after the attack, just as outraged as the women they stood shoulder to shoulder with.Even men who prescribe to conservative, patriarchal thinking can’t be typecast: a man that won’t permit his wife to leave the house may very well send all his daughters to school. “There is no one way in which men perceive women in India,” says Kishwar. The right of people of all ideologies to live as they see fit is part of the DNA of this country, she says, but it’s the government’s job to make sure they co-exist under the law: “You have to accept this diversity and engage with it.”

MORE: Brutal New Delhi Gang Rape Outrages Indians, Spurs Calls for Action

THE CASE

When police found Ram Singh on the afternoon of Dec. 17, the day after the rape, he was sitting in the bus, parked outside Ravidas, according to police documents. On another afternoon, he might have been driving students to and from the school that contracted the bus out. On that day, the bus was still damp inside, apparently having just been washed out. Singh tried to flee the cops as they approached, but he was, in their words, “overpowered and apprehended.” He was a wearing a green and black T-shirt with a torn collar that was spotted with blood, along with his plastic sandals. According to police, “on sustained interrogation,” he confessed to his involvement in the gang rape the night before, and went to identify all of his alleged co-conspirators in the crime. The report says Singh admitted to trying to run over the victims with the bus after he and the others threw them out, in order to protect their identities. It says he also admitted to using the victims’ clothes to wipe flesh and blood out of the inside of the bus, and then lighting them in a fire, around which “a few persons of the locality had gathered to warm their hands.” Why had they done it? According to police, Singh and the co-accused say they did it for fun—“to pick up a female passenger to have sex and make merry.”

(MORE: India’s Shame)

Indians may now never know what Singh did that day. Officials told Indian media that sometime between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. on March 11, he hanged himself in his cell. V.K. Anand, the defense lawyer hired by Singh’s family to represent the brothers, says he doesn’t see how Singh could have killed himself in a crowded, high-security cell, and suspects foul play. Singh’s parents, in New Delhi at the time, have also expressed doubts about how their son died and was treated during his incarceration. Interior Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde called the death a “major lapse” in security. He said that while preliminary findings suggested suicide, the government had also launched a formal inquiry into his death.

Will Dec. 16 indeed herald lasting change? As the weeks tick by, and the headlines about rape around the country have begun falling off the front pages, some Indians are dubious. “Tipping points only happen over glasses of single-malt whisky in the drawing rooms of Delhi,” says Ajay Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi. “There are no real tipping points in India … There is no bottom to how far we can we go down.” And yet. Shortly after the atrocity in New Delhi, a girl was also subject to a brutal gang rape—in Ram Singh’s Karauli district, where the crime is common. What was uncommon was that the girl’s assailants were arrested. The family of the Dec. 16 victim deserves closure. But perhaps the wider justice is an India where no one—whether they lead a hardscrabble existence in a slum or are quietly heading home at night—slides off the map.

—With reporting by Nilanjana Bhowmick / New Delhi and Srikant Tripathy / Karauli

MORE: One Billion Rising: An End to Violence Against Women