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Journalism of Courage
A Noida fast-track court Monday sentenced an assistant professor at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Jodhpur to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment and imposed a fine of Rs 20,000 for raping a former student in 2019 when she was 35 years old.
Vivek Vijay Vargia was a faculty member in the department of mathematics at IIT Jodhpur from February 2009 to December 2024. Vargia knew the woman, as he had taught her for a brief period in 2000. The two met again in 2011, when she was hired for a contractual job in February 2011 at the same institute and began looking for better career options.
The rape case against Vargia, then 45, was registered at a Noida police station on June 6, 2019. The woman in her complaint told the police that he raped her when she went to meet him for a job at the GAIL guesthouse in Noida’s Film City that day.
The police arrested Vargia the next day from Noida’s Sector 16 metro station and filed a chargesheet on September 25, 2019.
On November 27, Additional Sessions Judge Priyanka Kumari found Vargia guilty of raping the woman and denied the contention behind the six-hour delay in the FIR.
“In this case, testimony showed that the police arrived at the scene soon after the incident and that the delay in formally registering the FIR occurred at the police station, not due to the victim’s hesitation,” the order read.
During the hearing, the court found the statements of prosecution witnesses consistent and credible and held that their testimony supported the prosecution’s account that the accused had called the woman to a guest house on the pretext of a job offer, after which the assault occurred.
Rejecting the accused’s claim that the woman never visited the guest house, the court relied on the cumulative evidence to establish his presence and involvement beyond a reasonable doubt.
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