By Raju Vernekar
Mumbai, Oct 4:
Amid outrage over the death of a rape victim in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras, the National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) in its report-‘Crime in India’ 2019 has stated that one rape incident occurs every 16 minutes in India.
The report shows how common crimes against women have witnessed a steep rise across the country. A total of 4,05,861 cases of crime against women were registered during 2019, showing an increase of 7.3% over 2018.
As per the horrifying statistics, every 16 minutes, a woman is raped somewhere in India, and every four minutes woman experiences cruelty at the hands of her in-laws. In 2019, the country had recorded 88 rape cases every day. Of the total 32,033 reported rape cases in the year, 11% were from the Dalit community.
“The majority of cases under crime against women under IPC were registered under ‘Cruelty by Husband or His Relatives’ (30.9%) followed by ‘Assault on Women with Intent to Outrage her Modesty’ (21.8%), ‘Kidnapping & Abduction of Women’ (17.9%) and ‘Rape’ (7.9%). The crime rate registered per lakh women population is 62.4 in 2019 in comparison with 58.8 in 2018″, the data shared by NCRB showed.
As per the data, maximum rape cases were reported from Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. While Rajasthan reported 6,000 rape cases last year, UP had 3,065 cases.
The country also recorded a decline of 0.7 per cent in cases of kidnapping and abduction in 2019 over the previous year, even as women and girls were victims in 78.6 per cent of the overall cases. A total of 1,05,037 such cases with 1,08,025 victims were registered in 2019, down from 1,05,734 cases in 2018, the data showed.
Human Trafficking
A total of 2,260 cases of human trafficking were registered in 2019 compared to 2,278 cases in 2018, showing a decrease of 0.8%. A total of 6,616 victims comprising 2,914 children and 3,702 adults, were reported to be trafficked. Apart from this, 6,571 victims were rescued from clutches of traffickers and 5,128 persons were arrested in 2,260 cases of trafficking.
Crime against foreigners and crime by foreigners
Totally 409 crimes were registered against foreigners (tourists and residents) compared to 517 cases in 2018, showing a decrease of 20.9%. Most of the cases registered were under Theft (142) and Cheating (41). Out of 517 victims in 409 registered cases, 56.4% of the victims were from Asian Countries (292) followed by 20.9% of victims from Europe (108).
