Delhi Women's Commission Gets a New Chief: BJP's Lata Gupta Takes Charge Ending a Two-Year Vacancy
New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Lata Gupta has been appointed as the chairperson of Delhi Commission for Women (DCW), the Delhi chief minister’s office announced on Sunday, July 27, filling a post which has remained vacant since January 2024.
The position had been vacant for more than two years after Swati Maliwal resigned from her post in 2024, after the then-ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) nominated her to the Rajya Sabha. The position was then vacated abruptly. Thereafter, in May 2024, Delhi’s Lieutenant Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena further dismissed 233 temporary workers at the DCW alleging they were allegedly “improperly appointed”.
The vacancies had collided with the downfall of the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi, which was facing the heat of probe agencies, including in the Delhi excise policy case. The AAP lost the assembly election in Delhi in February 2025.
The interim positional charge was then handed to Rashmi Singh, who was simultaneously serving as the Secretary of the Women and Child Development (WCD) Department. However, as an interim bureaucrat, she lacked the statutory authority to head the commission, leaving the body unable to function effectively.
In February 2026, the Delhi high court issued a formal ultimatum demanding an immediate timeline to reconstitute the panel. This legal ultimatum compelled the Delhi Government and the Lieutenant Governor to take action on the matter immediately.
Lata Gupta, who is the current chairperson of DCW, is a Vice President of Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and a former two time municipal councillor from Laxmi Nagar in the East Delhi Municipal Corporation. Upon taking charge of the Office, Ms. Gupta declared that her immediate priorities are “speedy disposal of pending complaints and resolving these issues within a fixed timeframe”, as per a report by ANI.
Shyam Bala, Malti Verma, Lata Sodhi, Sanrika Sharma Jha and Renu Bhalla are the newly appointed board members of DCW, along with Lata Gupta.
Before the latest appointments, the DCW remained understaffed for over two years. Thus, pending cases continued to accumulate, creating a massive backlog of the lakhs of unresolved distress, domestic violence and abuse complaints.
Last year, The Wire reported that active cases piled up into lakhs with no mechanism for disposal, as no officers or councillors were present to respond to incoming grievances or coordinate with the police.
Due to the dormancy of the position, essential operational units – Mobile Help Facility, Crisis-Intervention Cell, Rape Crisis Cell, Sahyogini Cell, Acid Watch and Anti-Human Rehabilitation Cell became non-functional. This operational standstill left over two lakh cases pending, leaving the abuse victims stranded without any legal or psychological support from the units under DCW.
This led to the judicial intervention, ultimately leading to the appointment of Lata Gupta.
As Gupta takes charge of the office, her primary objective will be to revive the commission’s operation and clear the backlog of more than two lakh pending cases.
This article went live on July twenty-seventh, two thousand twenty six, at fifty-eight minutes past eight in the evening.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
