How civilised or criminal a nation depends on the number of crimes committed by people living there. In India, it is calculated in number of crimes per one lakh of population. This is called crime rate.
The National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) on Thursday released Crime in India data showing decline in crime rate, which has shown a marked improvement after 2015.
The trend in crime rates between 2009 and 2018:
Reports of the National Crime Records Bureau show that India's crime rate saw a steep decline in 2016, but this is due to a new methodology of registering crimes in India.
A sudden dip in crime rate in India since 2016 - two years after the Narendra Modi government came to power at the Centre. The crime rate was over 540 in 2013, which increased to 581 in 2014 and almost 582 in 2015. The crime rate then suddenly dropped - by about 35 per cent-- to 379.3 in 2016 increasing to 388.6 in 2017 and dipping again in 2018 to 383.5.
This raises an obvious question: how did Indians shed their criminal character by such a big margin? The answer lies in a new methodology adopted by the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB). It is called the Principal Offence Rule (POR), which the home ministry-controlled bureau adopted for classifying crime data of 2016.
According to the Principal Offence Rule, each criminal incident is recorded as one crime. If many offences are registered in a single FIR case, only the most heinous crime - one that attracts maximum punishment -- will be considered as counting unit.
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For example, if there is an incident involving abduction, wrongful confinement, rape or gangrape and murder, it will be listed in the NCRB data as murder. All these are separate crimes under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) but while gangrape attracts maximum punishment of life imprisonment, murder can lead to death sentence to the culprit.
The Principal Offence Rule is criticised as it tends to "hide" many crimes - as in the 2012 Nirbhaya case or recent Hyderabad veterinarian's gangrape and murder case - because only one of the offence would attract maximum punishment, and hence counted in the NCRB database as one crime.
The NCRB had earlier defended adoption of this methodology saying data collection from police stations is done manually. And, if an incident involving abduction, rape or gangrape and murder is counted under three different heads in the NCRB, it may lead to over-reporting of criminal incidents.
This principal is followed in many developed countries, including 18 of the European Union. But then 21 others in the EU don't follow this rule for crime data collection.
But dipping crime rate must not confuse you. The actual number of crimes has increased by 1.3 per cent, in 2018 compared to 2017. More people were murdered in 2018 with 1.3 per cent more murder cases registered during the year than 2017, which had witnessed a significant decline of 5.9 per cent over 2016.
In spite of all campaigns of Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, the crime rate per lakh women increased to 58.8 in 2018 in comparison with 57.9 in 2017. And, the crime rate per lakh children population was 31.8 in 2018 in comparison with 28.9 in 2017.