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Thursday, February 7, 2019

Errantry: Where is our Criminal Justice Data?

In December, the news machine went into a tizzy when a government notification authorising several agencies to intercept communications became public. The "snooping order", as it was labelled, was stoutly defended by the Government at the time, which stated that a look at past data would confirm the order was nothing out of the ordinary. That did not stop challenges to the notification being filed with the Supreme Court, but it did encourage persons to find that "past data" through requests under the Right to Information Act, 2005 [RTI]. 

This past week, it was reported that the Government has refused to provide any of the concerned data, citing it to be "top secret". Mind you, this includes data on how many agencies have been similarly authorised in the past, as well as a figure for how many interception orders have been issued — one finds it difficult to imagine either being "top secret" material. Nevertheless, when the very basis for classifying items as "secret" has been refused to the public on account of secrecy, I guess this is par for the course.

My concern here, though, is not with this spat over the snooping order. Instead, my issue is with the government not publishing the annual Crime in India Report for a year. Crime in India is an annual publication by the National Crime Records Bureau that dates back to 1955. For a lot of years, it forms the only source of macro-level data on the criminal justice system in India. While it is no longer the only data source, it continues to represent the single most comprehensive data source for the criminal justice system even today. 

Despite this pre-eminent position, the Annual Report for 2017 is yet to be released. It is usual for the Report to come out in the middle of the subsequent year, but we are now in February of 2019.

By no means am I suggesting that Crime in India is a "good" source. Far from it. The methodological gaps and erroneous figures, all the way back from 1955, mean that most researchers treat the data with a generous dollop of salt. Nevertheless, in the absence of any comparable source, the same set of researchers — myself included — continue to swear by the Report and devour the statistics to find some meaning and patterns amidst the numbers.

Without the Crime in India 2017 Report, discussing the Central and State Government's performance on issues of criminal justice is nothing but clutching at straws. While these assessments would have helped in the State level elections that went by, it will certainly contribute to people making a more honest assessment of just how much, or how little, has changed at the macro-level. Have police gotten any better and quicker at solving crime and filing cases? Have courts become any quicker in dealing with the cases that are actually filed? These are not purely academic questions, but make a real difference to all our lives.

Crime in India is not the only publication relevant to criminal justice statistics. The Government had also been publishing the annual Prison Statistics Report since 1995, an extremely valuable resource to figure out just who it is that faces the brunt of the criminal sanction. While we do have similar sociological data on the death penalty — arguably better quality data — there is still nothing as comprehensive as the Prison Statistics Reports. 

Unfortunately, even this has suffered under the current regime. The last time Prison Statistics was published was for 2015. Thankfully some states have been very active in giving updated information about the prisons under their control, but again, it does not excuse the NCRB from discharging its burden as the central agency responsible for this data-collection and analysis. 

The point of this rant is pretty simple. To be able to make things better, we need the unvarnished facts about just how bad things are. It is fair to say that no government has managed to provide that honest assessment of the criminal justice system in India till date, and nor has any government managed to do good by keeping that data to itself. But by taking away even that imperfect set of information, the government denies the most basic tools needed to spur innovation and change in a sector that is crying out for some fresh thinking. So please, give us our data!     

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