When the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) Report 2023 was published after an unnecessary lapse of nearly two years, it was not a reflection of transparency but a challenge to recollection. While reports are supposed to show a picture of law and order in India, the report reads as if it is a study in selective seeing what the State prefers to see and, much more importantly, what it chooses to erase.
The NCRB’s data functions like gospel in courtrooms, reports, and media outlets. And yet, the authority of its findings relies on the assumption that the act of counting is not itself an act of power. Counting crime, however, is a political act masked in the bureaucratic detachment of its tables, graphs, and other representations of data. The political project is quiet but to present to the national imagination of justice the act of determining which crime, and more importantly, who’s suffering, is worth preserving in the record.
The Politics of Delay
The NCRB’s (National Crime Records Bureau) report of 2023, which detailed crime across the nation of India, including its 28 states and 8 Union Territories, was released in September 2025. The prior report (Crime in India 2021) took an entire 14 months to come out; this 2023 report has taken nearly 2 years. The Ministry of Home Affairs explanation for the delay, “data consolidation and verification”, is a common and routine bureaucratic response.
However, the timing matters. Delays distort accountability. By the time the data is in the public domain, it is no longer a measurement of the political moment it originally described. When hate crimes flare, when trends of custodial violence rise, when protests become suppressed – those realities have become lost within time. The NCRB’s silence is neither neutral nor impartial; instead, it is strategic.
The delay in the publication of ‘data’ in moments of political sensitivity turns ‘public data’ into a curated and managed narrative. That the 2023 report arrives late, after two national elections have already occurred, and several rounds of communal violence, is no coincidence; it is very evidently institutionalized amnesia.
Selective Vision: What the Numbers Hide
The most immediate observation for a careful reader is what is not recorded. Jammu & Kashmir, according to the NCRB, reported zero sedition cases in 2023 and zero cases of communal or religious violence. This is a region where expression is restricted, people have been detained en masse under the Public Safety Act, and the internet is repeatedly shut down. The data suggests order and harmony; however, lived experience reveals pervasive control.
Maharashtra, not to be outdone by Jammu and Kashmir, has also had well-publicized prosecutions under UAPA and sedition laws; it thus recorded only one case of indirect UAPA prosecution and one sedition FIR in the same year. For reference, independent observers track FIRs, and the media covered at least a dozen UAPA/sedition FIRs that occurred in that year.
The issue isn’t just about statistical erasure and representation; it’s how classification is used as a tool of governance. A sedition FIR can be reclassified as “public mischief,” or a hate-crime FIR as simply “rioting.” The very fabric of normalcy can be maintained by the State. With the examples from criminal law enforcement, the NCRB’s annual report provides further quantification and narrative control.
The Erasure of Hate
One of the most obvious gaps is still the absence of any hate-crime and lynching data. After the widespread of mob lynchings in 2017, which led to huge public outrage, the NCRB created a new category for “hate crime,” “honour killings” and “mob violence.” After a year, those categories dropped out of the tables. The government told Parliament that states were giving them “unreliable data.” In the years since, there has not been a single official record of hate crimes in India.
This bureaucratic erasure is particularly striking when independent monitoring shows supportive evidence of hate crimes. The India Hate Lab found in its 2025 Report that Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra together accounted for more than 50% of hate-speech incidents across India observed. Yet in looking at the NCRB 2023 tables of incidents of crime, it covers records of “rioting” and “offences against the state,” without any named hate.
As such, violence with a communal motive is folded into a generic “group clashes,” “public disorder,” or “arson.” The political becomes the statistical. The intentional becomes the invisible. By not naming hate, the state avoids evidence of their own complicity in enabling hate.
When ‘Marginal’ Means Massive
According to the NCRB report of 2023, crimes against women increased by 0.7% and crimes against children increased by 9.2%. All of the media accounts repeated news stories featuring the language: “Crimes up marginally.” But the word “marginal” itself conceals more than it reveals.
Domestic cruelty, the largest category of crime against women, remains at a staggering 31.4%, as assault and sexual harassment follow back-to-back. For children, sexual offences under POCSO comprise over 80% of all crimes documented. The adverse statistics of conviction rates leave much to be desired, with higher than 30% in many of the states, while pendency rates approach or exceed 90% in court systems.
The distortion lies in the flatness of the data itself. The data are counting incidents and not silences. Underreporting, arising from stigma, police refusal, or fear of retaliation, is widely accepted to be pervasive. When NCRB states that violence has levelled and/or stabilized, it is the institutional response that has levelled and not the violence itself.
Even in the absence of intersectionality in crime, intersectionality gets omitted in collectives. If a Dalit woman is raped by an upper caste person, the report lists the event as “crime against women,” not “crime against SC.” In addition, if a queer or disabled survivor is the victim, they have no collective statistical identity at all. The “blindness” of the system prevents the recognition of compounded vulnerability and fails to acknowledge the visibility of the crimes, which makes them least able to seek justice and experience the most victimization.
Free Speech without a Trace
The discrepancy between what is experienced on the ground and what is officially reported is perhaps most pronounced in cases involving freedom of speech. While the judiciary has made it clear, on numerous occasions, that dissent is a right in a democracy, the NCRB’s data from 2023 tells an entirely different story, one of perhaps complete calm—as if India has no crisis of free speech whatsoever.
A key event occurred in Kunal Kamra v. Union of India, which was decided by the Bombay High Court on August 22, 2024. The case challenged a provision of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2023, namely Rule 3(1)(b)(v), which allowed a “fact-checking unit” that the government had notified to declare internet content “fake or false or misleading” about the business of the Central Government. Once identified, social media intermediaries would be required to remove or disable the content.
Kamra asserted that this provision amounted to the government being the sole truth authority, a prior restraint that violated Article 19(1)(a), and went beyond the limits of “reasonable restrictions” in Article 19(2).
Article 19(1)(a): (1) All citizens shall have the right—
- to freedom of speech and expression;
Article 19(2): (2) Nothing in sub-clause (a) of clause (1) shall affect the operation of any existing law, or prevent the State from making any law, in so far as such law imposes reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right conferred by the said sub-clause in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.
The Bombay High Court agreed and struck down the rule on constitutional terms. In strong words, Justices G.S. Patel and Neela Gokhale said the rule imposed a “chilling effect” on speech and “flipped the democratic relationship between citizen and State.” The judgment affirmed that free expression is not a privilege given by the government, but a freedom that constrains government authority itself.
Nevertheless, the NCRB’s section on “Offences Against the State” gives no trace of this struggle. There is no recognition of hundreds of FIRs against journalists, stand-up artists, and students, filed under vaguely stated sections of the IPC and the IT Act. The report indicates only 107 sedition cases and 361 UAPA cases, numbers that are significantly lower than independent counts. What results from this is a fictional statistic: on paper, dissent hardly exists, but in practice, dissent is policed every day.
The Illusion of Order: Data without Democracy
The NCRB’s credibility is cracking even in seemingly neutral categories. While the report indicates a drop in cybercrime cases of 11.7 in Mumbai, RTI data shows that only 2% of the complaints made through the National Cyber Crime Portal are even registered as FIRs. As an expert told The Times of India, this decline is “a statistical illusion”; the progressive appearance of reducing cases masked police reluctance to register cases. Fewer FIRs are better numbers; better numbers are better for political comfort.
The illusion is deepened inside India’s prisons. The Prison Statistics 2023 report states that there is a total population of 5.8 lakh, of which 77.9% are undertrials, people who have not committed any offence. Among undertrials, Dalits comprise 22%, Adivasis 13%, and Muslims 16%, all incredibly disproportionate to their representation in the population. The report also mentions 1,800 plus custodial deaths last year, but does not provide much detail about this, including state or cause. Women, approximately 4% of all inmates, still do not have access to basic sanitary and maternal care. The overall impression is that presenting data without any context turns structural injustice into bureaucratic routine.
In the meantime, the government has been pleased to note a 26% drop in “Offences against the State”, down from 7,128 in 2019 to only 5,272 cases in 2023. During this time, we are expected to assume, show that the nation remains stable. In this regard, the “decline” is merely a reclassification, not a reform, as the state is only quieter because it has erased dissent from the ledger, while journalists, activists, and students are now experiencing surveillance or detention.
In the end, what the NCRB provides is not an understanding but control of the narrative. Its lack of transparency converts governance into ideology; a system where what is not counted is overlooked and what is overlooked is, by design, absent.
Towards Data Justice
If recognition is the first step to justice, then the crime data of India requires a constitutional reboot.
The NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) ought to be thought of as a public accountability office, and not just a bureaucratic appendage for record-keeping. Its processes should be opened to audit, its categories, a reflection of social reality rather than bureaucratic convenience. Independent auditing, by the National Human Rights Commission, specific Parliamentary Committees, or civil society organizations, should be made part of its function. Existing independent databases or projects documenting hate crimes should also be recognized as proper and legitimate data sources, existing in context that can fill official silences.
To put it more bluntly, police or peripheral agencies can also create invisibility and silence of their own. In the end, crime statistics are not just numbers; they are moral narratives. In particular, the NCRB report for 2023 speaks less about the status of crime and even more about the status of The State itself. In short, it reminds us that numbers can be used as a way to practice power- invisibility is engineered and silence is measurable.
As long as data is not democratized, justice will not be served.
The petition filed by Kunal Kamra can be read here:
The entire judgment in Kunal Kamra v. Union of India can be read here:
(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this resource has been worked on by Preksha Bothara)
Related:
NCRB’s Prison Statistics Report 2019 paints a bleak picture
Inexplicable delay in release of NCRB figures
India Hate Lab Report 2024: Unveiling the rise of hate speech and communal rhetoric
Holding power to account: CJP’s efforts to combat hate and polarisation
Free Speech Upheld: Bombay HC strikes down IT (Amendment) Rules, 2023 as unconstitutional