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.
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