The recent sexual assault of a 22 year photojournalist by five men in one of the ‘better areas’ of Mumbai has stirred a debate on the safety of women across India. We decided to check out the statistics released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in their report ‘Crime in India 2012” to uncover some statistics on crime in the country. Here are some inputs about rape cases in India from the report:
• Out of the 54 cities mentioned in the report, 12 reported a fall in cases over the last year. Kanpur, Agra, Lucknow are some of the cities which have seen a fall in reported incidents.
• Delhi, Mumbai, Jaipur, Indore and Bhopal rank as the top five cities with the highest number of rape cases in 2012. Delhi has the highest cases at 585 followed by Mumbai (232), Jaipur (134), Indore (125) and Bhopal (114).
• A sharp increase was noted in places like Raipur (166.7 percent), Kozhikode (157 percent), Coimbatore (122 percent), Ghaziabad (200 percent) and Varanasi (120 percent).
• Among the five zones of India, the South zone is the only one where there has been a visible fall in cases over the last year. Barring Tamil Nadu, the three other states, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka reported a fall of 7%, 10% and 2.4 %, respectively over the last year.
• Cases reported in the East zone are more or less flat with the exception of Odisha which has seen a 31 percent jump. The West zone has surged by 13.8 percent mainly due to a jump in cases in Maharastra.
• States like Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal have the highest number of reported cases in 2012.