Editorial: NCRB needs to be more up to date

In keeping with the BJP-led government’s habitual tardiness on publishing important statistics, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) released its annual Crime in India report for 2023 on Monday, Sept. 29, a year and a half late. To explain the delay, the Ministry of Home Affairs has been citing the same ruse for months on end, that rigorous validation and cross-state compilation of data from 36 states/UTs and 53 metropolitan cities was taking time.

That’s not a good enough explanation. For a government that has invested so much on data digitalisation, it should have known that improved reporting would yield a torrent of data and that capacity for validation and analysis would have to be increased as well. While the latest report does cover some new crime categories — which is welcome — the data suffers from a considerable lag: Policymakers are essentially having to design corrective measures on the basis of two-year-old data. In respect of long-recurring dysfunctions such as crime against women, the lag may not be too problematic. But emerging crime phenomena like cybercrime need much greater alacrity.

Broadly, NCRB 2023 confirms the trajectory projected from previous reports. The total number of crimes registered by police stations spurted 7.2% over 2022. The crime rate got worse from 422.2 per one lakh population in 2022 to 448.3 in 2023. Crime in urban India witnessed sharper growth at 10.6%. Crimes against women increased marginally (0.7%), with husbands or relatives accounting for a third of the cases. Crimes against children continued their alarming increase, 9.2% over 2022, with POCSO cases constituting 38.2% of them.

While policy heft must continue to tackle long-standing trends like those above, the rapid growth of some of the newer forms of crime underlines the need to reduce the data lag and generate more granularity. According to the latest NCRB report, cybercrime cases jumped 31.2% in 2023, with the number of cases per 1 lakh population going up from 4.8 in 2022 to 6.2 in 2023. But NCRB is late reporting this trend. According to the database maintained by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) through portals like the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCRP) and the Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System (CFCFRMS), cybercrime cases continued to rise sharply in 2024, with reported incidents reaching 22.68 lakh—a 42% increase over 2023. Reported financial losses due to cyber fraud skyrocketed to Rs 22,845.73 crore in 2024, a 206% jump from 2023.

There is a basis to believe that the institutional response to cybercrime has not kept pace with the growth of the phenomenon. Nationwide, only 1.9% of the complaints made through portals like the National Cyber Crime Portal led to FIRs in 2023. In Delhi, 450 cybercrime complaints are received every day, but only 407 FIRs were registered in all of 2023. Smaller complaints under ₹15,000-20,000 don’t even make it past the complaint stage due to limited staff and investigative capacity. No wonder that while NCRB 2023 reports a chargesheeting rate for IPC crimes of 72.7%, it does not give a matching figure for cybercrime cases, indicating that most go no further than the FIR. Because the majority of cybercrimes are thus missing in the public record, only a minuscule number make it to the NCRB annual report, therefore predisposing our policy response to be tardy and inaccurate.