New Delhi: As the horrific Nirbhaya case seemingly comes to a close with the execution set to take place at 6 am on March 20, while there still remains ambiguity over whether the hanging will be delayed yet again, an analysis of crime statistics shows that the total reported cases of crimes against women has gone up since 2013; whereas the number of rape cases reported has seen a marginal decrease.
What's slightly more significant from an analysis of this data is that the incidents of crime against women do not seem to correspond to the utilisation of the Nirbhaya fund sanctioned to states and union territories since 2013.
According to the crime statistics put together by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the year after the December 2012 rape case in Delhi, there were 12,888 reported cases of crimes against women in Delhi.
This number only went on to increase until 2015. In 2014, this number rose to 15,265, which further spiked to 17,104 cases reported in 2015. A similar spike can be seen in the number of rape cases reported in the Capital.
In 2013, 1,636 rape cases were reported, which increased to 2,096 in 2014 and 2,199 in 2015.
However, since 2015, a downward trend seems to have started in the number of crimes against women cases being reported. In 2016, there were 15,310 cases of crimes against women reported in Delhi and in 2017, the number went down to 13,076 before picking up to 13,640 cases in 2018.
A similar trend was seen in the number of rape cases being reported in Delhi. The number reported rape cases started decreasing from 2015 to about 1,215 cases in 2018.
Ever since the Nirbhaya fund was set up by the UPA-II government in 2013, successive Central governments have taken every opportunity to show poor utilisation of the fund by states and union territories as a reason for increasing cases of rape and crimes against women.
While it would seem that such a correlation might make sense, a critical analysis of the utilisation of funds and crimes against women show no correlation whatsoever.
For example, Delhi is often listed as one of the UTs with the poorest utilisation of the Nirbhaya fund, but the total cases of rape reported in the Capital have reduced albeit marginally since the fund was set up.
According to data provided by the government in Lok Sabha, Delhi had used less than 5 per cent of the Rs 390.90 crore Nirbhaya fund sanctioned to it by the Centre till November 2019. While the total number of crimes against women has gone up in Delhi since 2013, the reported number of rape cases has gone down.
Similarly, the same government data shows that Uttarakhand and Mizoram were States that reported maximum utilisation from the Nirbhaya fund, yet of these Uttarakhand has seen a steady increase in crimes against women and rape cases since 2013 and Mizoram has seen an erratic increase in the number crimes against women and a marginal drop in rape cases.
In Uttarakhand, crimes against women shot up from 1,719 in 2013 to 2,814 in 2018 and rape cases spiked to 561 in 2018 from 228 in 2013. In Mizoram, 2018 data shows 249 cases of crimes against women compared to 177 cases reported in 2013 and 50 rape cases in 2018 compared to 89 in 2013.
However, what remains consistent, at least with these states and union territories is that they saw a sharp rise in cases of crimes against women and rapes in the immediate years following the Nirbhaya case of 2012.
(Image from theindianexpress.com)