The recent death of 24-year-old Deepika Nagar in Greater Noida has forced the country to confront a brutal truth: crimes against women continue to surge, despite what the statistics show.

Deepika died in the wee hours of 18 May, after allegedly being thrown from the roof of her marital home over unmet dowry demands. Her parents say they had already paid a dowry of Rs 20 lakh, but her husband and in-laws were allegedly demanding another Rs 50 lakh and a Toyota Fortuner.

Barely a week earlier, on 12 May, model and actress Twisha Sharma was found hanging in her in-law’s house in Bhopal. (Her mother-in-law is retired principal district and sessions judge Giribala Singh.)

During the post-mortem, investigators failed to produce the belt used in the alleged suicide. Women’s rights activist Dr Ranjana Kumari of the Centre for Social Research publicly questioned how such a crucial lapse could occur in a sensitive dowry death investigation. In Twisha’s, as in many such cases, husbands and key accused conveniently disappear before arrests can be made.

These are not isolated tragedies. They are part of a far larger national emergency only partially reflected in the National Crime Records Bureau’s latest data.

According to the NCRB, 4.41 lakh cases were registered in 2024, slightly lower than the 4.48 lakh recorded in 2023. The crime rate also dipped marginally from 66.2 to 64.6 per lakh women. Does this mean women are safer? Read on.

India recorded 5,737 dowry deaths in 2024 — that’s an average of nearly 16 deaths every day. Even as the number of crimes against women continue to rise — which the NCRB attributes to improved reporting — conviction rates remain scandalously low.

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A rape is reported in India every 18 minutes. Yet the national conviction rate in rape cases stands at just 24.4 per cent. In practical terms, that means not even 25 of every 100 reported cases end in conviction. In........

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