Data Explorer

What happens after a case is registered

India's crime statistics are usually read as a ranking of which states are dangerous. They are not very good at that. What they are good at is describing the machinery: of the cases a state did register, how many reached a chargesheet, how many trials ended in a conviction, and how much is still waiting.

Why this page does not rank states by crime. A registered case requires someone to go to a police station and someone there to write it down. Where reporting is easier and policing more responsive, more crime is recorded — so a state with a high count may be a state where the system works. Counts of registered crime measure reporting at least as much as they measure crime, which is why every chart here is about outcomes instead.

Category

Stage one: does it reach a chargesheet?

The chargesheeting rate is cases charge-sheeted as a share of cases the police disposed of during the year. A case that goes nowhere is closed with a final report instead: untraced, insufficient evidence, or found to be false.

Chargesheeting rate by state

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Stage two: does the trial end in a conviction?

Convictions as a share of trials completed during the year, which is how NCRB defines the conviction rate. It is not the share of reported cases that end in a conviction: most cases are still pending, and they appear in the next panel instead.

Conviction rate by state

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What is still waiting

Cases still pending at the end of the year, as a percentage of everything the stage had to deal with. Pending cases carry over, so a state can charge-sheet everything it received this year and still show a high figure from an older backlog.

Stage
Cases pending as a share of cases handled, by state

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Every category side by side

The same two rates, for all six categories, nationally. This is the comparison the page exists for: the machinery does not treat every kind of case alike.

Chargesheeting and conviction rates by category of crime
Rate

What this data cannot tell you

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