The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) recently released its Crime in India 2023 report. NCRB’s Crime in India reports are a comprehensive analysis of the crime scene in the country. Despite its fairly wide acceptance, some users of crime data — within and outside government — are sceptical of the accuracy of the data in the report. There is even a small section that believes the report massages statistics to cast the establishment in good light. Such views add spice to our dynamic democracy, but are otherwise gibberish.

However, if you discard NCRB reports as unreliable, there is nothing else in the public domain that would give you a picture of crime incidence, nature, and trends, among others. One criticism that holds is that official crime figures are more than a year old when they are released. This delay is because the NCRB is dependent on state police forces for the data. Many states delay submitting data, and a few do not submit all the numbers in one go. Still, the NCRB comes........

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