The deaths of women from so-called stove explosions while cooking or making tea are so common in Gujarat that it hardly makes anyone sit up.

The victims’ names and addresses differ. But the similarities are startling: most victims are young and recently married, and invariably the police treat the cases as accidents, based on dying declarations.

The figures speak for themselves: in 2005, 343 women across the state died in kerosene stove explosions; this year there have been 330 deaths so far.

Also the fact that most homes now use wick stoves rather than primus stoves into which air was pumped to build pressure, making them more likely to explode. And unusually, by police figures, in 62 per cent of the cases, the stoves that burst are of ISI-approved brands.

Burns specialists and forensic experts — and sometimes police officers — say they know most of these cases are suicides, often in the face of harassment by husbands or in-laws, or plain murders. But investigations are stone-walled by the dying declarations which, police officers say, could have come under pressure or coercion, or from the woman’s unstated fears for her children’s future and of bringing her family a bad name.

The declarations are almost always similar: “The stove burst while cooking. My husband or in-laws have nothing to do with it.” This means that those responsible either for killing the woman or driving her to suicide go scot-free.

Says H G Patel, a former superintendent of police who has investigated more than two dozen cases, “Eighty per cent are suicides, not accidents. Rest are suspicious cases. But going by dying declarations we have to call them accidental. And most victims are aged between 22 and 35 years. It’s not as if women above 35 or men don’t cook.”

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