Who Was Rattan Bai Jain the First Woman to Face Death Penalty in Independent India and Why is She Still The Only One Executed?

THE DEATH PENALTY is one of the harshest punishments available under Indian law. While courts continue to give capital punishment in the "rarest of rare" cases, very few convicts are actually executed, especially in modern India. The legal process often stretches for years, sometimes decades. 

That is why what is rarer is the execution of a woman. In more than seven decades since independence, official records show only one woman has been judicially executed. Her name was Rattan Bai Jain. Despite 21 women currently being on death row across India in 2026, no other woman has met the same fate Rattan Bai.

Why was Rattan Bai Jain sentenced to death in 1955?

Rattan Bai Jain worked as a manager at a Family Planning (Sterility) Clinic in Delhi, where she first met the three girls she later murdered. Rattan suspected that these girls were having an affair with her husband, which led to her decision to fatally end their lives. 

Instead of using any weapons, Rattan Bai used poison to kill the three girls. According to evidence reported at the time, she mixed the lethal substance into the girls’ food or drinks. The poison was so strong that all three girls died instantly after consuming it. 

After her appeals and mercy petitions were rejected, Rattan Bai jain was executed on January 3, 1955, making it the first time a woman was executed in independent India. In official records she is still the only woman who faced judicial execution.

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Discrepancies in Recording Data in Early Independent India

According to the data collected by a National Law University report in 2020, India has carried out at least 720 executions since independence. The report claims that most of them were during the early years of independent India where the death penalty was used much more freely as opposed to modern times. The records obtained by People Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) gives even more staggering number, reporting that 1,422 executions were carried out in 16 Indian states between 1953 and 1963 alone. Uttar Pradesh was on top of the list to carry out death sentences during this period.

However, the record keeping at all these different states was weak during the nascent period of independent India. Maybe that is the reason when the last National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data reported on the total executions since independence in 2004, it only recorded Dhananjoy Chatterjee as the 55th person to be officially executed. Modern India has used the penalty much more sparingly, reserved for only “rarest of rare” cases. Since 2000s there has been only eight judicial executions with the latest being in 2020, when four convicts of 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape case were hanged. 

According to Square Circle Clinic’s The Death Penalty in India: Annual Statistics Report, Indian sessions court sentenced 10 women to death in 2025, which is the highest number of female death convictions since 2016. On the other hand, 118 men were given death sentences in 2025. All the 10 women sentenced to death last year were charged of murder.

21 Women Currently on Death Row in India

Out of the 571 people currently sentenced for death in India in 2026, 21 are women. Their cases range from terrorism and serial bomb blasts to honour killings, child murders, family massacres, dowry deaths and robbery-related killings. According to a report by the Square Circle Clinic at NALSAR University, nine of these women are from Uttar Pradesh alone, which also has the highest number of death row prisoners in the country.

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Among them, the longest-serving inmates include Shabnam Ali, who has spent 15 years on death row after being convicted for murdering seven members of her family, and Fehmida Mohd Hanif Sayyed, convicted in the 2003 Mumbai serial blasts case, who has waited 16 years for the final outcome of her appeal. Four women have remained under a death sentence for more than a decade, while most others were sentenced between 2024 and 2025 and are still awaiting confirmation of their sentences by various High Courts or the Supreme Court.

The cases also reflect how rare it is for women to receive capital punishment. Most of the convicts have exhausted only part of the legal process, with appeals, reviews or mercy petitions still pending. Former Supreme Court judge Justice Abhay S. Oka has also questioned the constitutional validity of the death penalty, while death penalty lawyer Yug Mohit Chaudhry has argued that the long years spent waiting for execution amount to psychological torment. Experts have further pointed to the severe mental health challenges and isolation faced by women on death row as their cases remain tied up in lengthy legal proceedings.

“Rarest of Rare”: Modern India’s Sparing Approach to Death Penalties

In modern India, a death sentence is never the end sentence for  a convict. It is rather the beginning of a long legal maze as the A convict can challenge the verdict in appeal, then seek review in the Supreme Court, then file a curative petition in the rarest of rare situations, and finally ask for mercy from the Governor or President under the Constitution. The Supreme Court has also observes that a convict must be allowed to exhaust appeal, review, and mercy remedies before a death warrant can be carried out, and even after mercy is rejected, there has to be a mandatory 14-day gap before execution. 

That is exactly why the 2012 Nirbhaya case dragged on for years. The convicts kept moving one plea after another at different stages, which courts and the government said delayed the hanging of the four convicts. The final execution came only on March 20, 2020, more than seven years after the crime. That long, stop-start process is one big reason executions are now so rare in India. While 571 people, including 21 women remain on the death row, many of them have been in the prison for more than a decade. 

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