I've talked about this before, but breaking up an aggregate number into its components is a big part of what we do at Data For India, and it almost always produces some startling insights.
In an earlier edition of The Big Shift, I talked of the crime statistic that many find surprising - that murder rates in India, as in most other countries, have been falling steadily over time.
But here's a nuance that we found in the data, one that stopped us in our tracks. The decline in murder rates in India is almost entirely as a result of fewer murders of men. The number of female victims of murder, on the other hand, has remained virtually unchanged over time.
"The number of female victims of murder has remained virtually unchanged over the last 25 years, even as the number of male victims of murder fell by over 30% over the same time period," my colleague Ameya Bokil writes in his work for us on homicide.
Over the years, men have accounted for a higher proportion of victims of murder. In 2023, nearly three in four victims were men. But men are overwhelmingly also the accused in murder cases. 94% of people arrested for murder in 2023 were men. Most cases of murder in India are reported to be as a result of personal or family disputes.
These disaggregations become important because the signals that they are sending need to be teased out and understood separately. The decline of the murder rate for men in India is likely to be driven by the reduction in armed conflict in parts of the country - the peak of rates of murder in the 1990s coincided with violence in Jammu & Kashmir and Punjab, and the state with the highest murder rate in 2023 was Manipur, which was experiencing ethnic violence. The lack of change in the number of female victims of murder, on the other hand, signals that little has changed within the home, where women are the most unsafe.
To move the needle on violence for all Indians will require us to pay attention to both things - large-scale armed conflict too, but also the daily dangers of life within four walls.
