Crime against Women in India: A State Level Analysis

Violence against Indian women is in reality much more than it may appear as there are some violence which are not considered as crime or go unreported or undocumented. The present paper is an attempt to understand Crime against women in the 28 major Indian states on the basis of the data published by National Crime Record Bureau in India over the period 2001-02 to 2014-15. The relative position of the states is determined based on both Year to Year as well as Compound Annual Growth Rate. Along with enforcement and punishment, there can other effective policy mechanisms for controlling crime against women. The paper thus aims to identify the factors which can control crime against women employing panel regression technique. Our result suggests that although there are fluctuations but the states’ are fronting different crime against women, most prominent being offence related to dowry. Further it can be concluded that parental guidance and education can inhibit crime against women whereas social deprivation and economic poverty can encourage it. One interesting finding is that economic growth can initially encourage crime against women but crime may fall after some threshold limit of economic growth