Old, wrong population figures make India’s crime statistics deceptive

Here’s a safe bet to make: the crime rate in India’s big cities will fall in 2021. Every year, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) presents data for the number of crime incidents in Indian cities.

The bureau also provides crime rates, which is the number of crime incidents per lakh of population. Giving the rate is a good idea because it allows us to compare cities with very different population sizes. The catch, however, is that NCRB does not change the population of cities between censuses that take place every 10 years.

As a result, the crime rate in cities falls sharply once in 10 years, not because of better policing but because the denominator – population—suddenly sees a jump every 10 years.


The analysis of crime rates for 17 large cities (with 2 million-plus population) shows that 14 of them reported a drastic fall in their crime rates in 2011 when compared with 2010.

That’s because for all the years between 2001 and 2010, it used 2001 population data to calculate the crime rate. Similarly, 2011 census data has been used for all subsequent years and will continue to be used till the 2021 census figures are available. This effectively makes crime rates for cities meaningless.

Kidnapping-for-marriage data doesn’t factor in elopements
Many who report on the data ignore this, though to be fair the NCRB makes it clear it is using population data from the last census. For states, UTs and the country as a whole, the bureau uses projected population data for the year to calculate crime rates, which makes them meaningful.

Because of the fixed denominator in crime rate calculations, the actual rates would be lower than the reported rates. How much of a difference does it make? Indicative crime rates for these cities for 2016 calculated after alinear projection of population data (based on the actual population growth between 2001 and 2011) suggests the actual crime rate would be significantly lower.

For instance, Delhi, dubbed the country’s crime capital, would see a fall in its crime rate by 139.1 points. The rates for Indore, Kochi and Kozhikode would also fall by over 100 points.

Crime rates for crimes against senior citizens, schedule castes and schedule tribes are also calculated on the census population and hence suffer from the same problem.

Rates for juvenile crime for 2016 are also not comparable with the previous year’s data. Going by the reported figures, the crime rate for juvenile delinquents was 2.5 in 2015, which increased to 8 in the latest report.

However, the earlier rate was calculated on the entire population base (1.26 billion) while for 2016 it is calculated on the basis of 446 million — the estimated child population for 2014. Again, this makes comparisons meaningless. Similarly, it makes a sensational headline that 37.7% of kidnappings were done for marriage.

However, the overwhelming bulk of these cases are filed by parents of consenting adults whose daughters have eloped. Thus, these are actually not kidnappings at all.

Here’s another googly in the fine print. The section under the Prevention of Corruption Act & related sections of the IPC cases show that cases declined from 5,250 in 2015 to 4,439 for 2016.

A dramatic clean-up? Sadly, no. The two numbers are not comparable because the latest figures exclude cases registered by the CBI.