The Supreme Court on Thursday accused the Modi-led NDA government of paying only "lip service" to the cause of women's security and questioned it for sitting on the Rs 3,000-crore Nirbhaya fund while failing to frame plans for the purpose. Stressing that creating an additional fund by itself wouldn't make any difference to security and welfare of women, a bench of Justices Prafulla C Pant and DY Chandrachud said the Centre should devolve money from the fund to state and district levels for use, instead of sitting over the corpus.

"There should be a national model so that there is uniformity in the scheme across the country. Let all states file response and we will examine."

The court also favoured a national scheme for witness protection. The bench asked the Centre and states to file response within six weeks. It also asked Jaising to formulate issues on sentencing policy in rape cases.