Crime in India

**Crime in India** is very common and happens in many different ways.  Along with violent crimes (like homicide, robbery, and assault), and property crimes (like burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson), there are major problems with organized crime, the illegal drug trade, arms trafficking, corruption, and many other forms of crime.  The most common types of crimes in India are listed below.

## Organized crime 
Organized crime is planned and done by groups of people.  Their goals are to gain power and make money in Illegal ways.  Common organized crimes in India include:
* Drug trafficking (moving and selling illegal drugs)
* Gunrunning (getting illegal guns, sneaking them into the country, and selling them)
* Money laundering
* Extortion (telling a person that he has to pay money, or something bad will happen to him, his business, or his family)
* Murder for hire (killing someone for pay)
* Fraud
* Human trafficking (tricking or kidnapping people, usually children or young women, into becoming slaves)
* Poaching (killing plants or animals that are illegal to kill, then selling them)
Many criminal organizations also commit these crimes:
* Black marketing (trading or selling things on the *black market*, which is illegal)
* Political violence (for example, trying to hurt or scare political candidates who they dislike)
* Religious violence (hurting or scaring other people because they are a different religion)
* Terrorism, including the 1993 Bombay bombings, 2006 Mumbai train bombings and the 2008 Mumbai attacks
* Abduction (kidnapping)

## Illegal drug trade
India is located between the Golden Crescent (made of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran) and the Golden Triangle (made of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos).  The Golden Crescent and the Golden Triangle are the two biggest makers of opium in Asia.  Their opium-making is secret and illegal.  Because of India's location, a lot of this illegal opium is trafficked (snuck illegally) through India's borders.

India is the world's largest maker of legal opium.  But its opium gets diverted (taken away by drug traffickers) to other countries where opium and heroin are illegal.  The heroin is then smuggled from Pakistan and Myanmar, with some heroin also shipped through Nepal.  The most commonly used drug in Mumbai is "Indian heroin" (called *desi mal* by the local population). (a treaty, or agreement, among most of the countries in the United Nations, and some other countries; its goal was to help enforce the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and the Convention on Psychotropic Substances)

## Arms trafficking
According to a report published together by Oxfam, Amnesty International, and the International Action Network on Small Arms in 2006, there are around 40 million illegal small arms in India.  This would mean that India had over half of the small arms in the entire world (the world had 75 million, according to the report).

Most of the illegal small arms end up in the states of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh.  But a large amount of illegal small arms are made in illegal arms factories in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and sold on the black market for as little as $5.08.  There are laws against killing some animals, taking rare plants, and smuggling them into other countries.  But a report published by the Environmental Investigation Agency  in 2004 said that more traders of wildlife skins go to India than any other country.  Between 1994 and 2003, there were 784 cases where the skins of tigers, leopards, or otters have been seized (taken away from illegal traders by police). and in the North-Eastern states of Nagaland and Mizoram.  Most tiger poaching happens in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Orissa, West Bengal, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.

Once they are poached, leopards, rhinoceros, reptiles, birds, insects, and rare species of plants are smuggled into the countries in Southeast Asia and the People's Republic of China.  Project Tiger created 23 tiger reserves (protected areas for tigers), said they had been successful since the number of tigers in India had increased.  Examples of cyber crime include: However, Pavan Duggan, a lawyer with the Supreme Court of India and cyber law expert, complained that the IT act focused too much on promoting e-commerce and not enough on dealing with cybercrimes. In 2006, India and the US agreed to have their law enforcement agencies work together more in fighting cybercrimes.  They saw this as an important part of counter-terrorism efforts.  The police often torture innocent people until they 'confess' (they say they did the crime).  This false confession is then used to save important, rich people who have actually committed crimes.  One major problem that keeps police violence possible is a lack of accountability (meaning no one gets in trouble if they torture a person), according to G.P. Joshi.  Joshi runs the Indian branch of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative in New Delhi.

In 2006, the Supreme Court of India decided a case called *Prakash Singh vs. Union of India*.  In its decision, the Court ordered central and state governments to begin police reform. The Court had two goals with its decision.  The first was to give tenure to police officers, and to make it simpler for police officers to get hired or transfer to a different area.  The second was to increase police accountability.

Criminals visit markets and other places that are popular with tourists, with the goal of committing crimes against foreigners (people from other countries). Westerners have become victims of robbery, rape, and other violent attacks.  Because foreigners often have more money than most people in India, they are often criminals'  favorite target for robbery and other serious crimes.  In 2000, two German tourists were shot in Himachal Pradesh.  A few weeks later, two Spanish tourists were killed by robbers in the same state.  Many foreign tourists are victims of violent crime in Kolkata.  In September 2006, criminals robbed the wallet of a British woman in Kolkata.

### Passport theft
In India, stealing tourists' passports from their luggage on trains and buses is very common. Theft of U.S. passports happens often, especially in major tourist areas.

### Scams
Criminals run many scams against tourists, especially in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan.

In 2006, an American became a victim of a scam at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai.  She lost $77 U.S. dollars.

#### Taxi scam
Taxi drivers also run scams in India.  These scams are run on tourists who do not know their way around India or Indian airports.  Some taxi drivers will drive tourists around the whole airport, so they can charge a lot of money for the ride when the part of the airport that the tourist wants to go to was actually very close by.  In March 2006, Biti Mohanty, the son of a senior police official in Orissa, raped a German tourist in Alwar, Rajasthan.  The next month, a Japanese woman was raped in Pushkar, Rajasthan.  In June 2007, a South Korean tourist was raped near Manali. The Indian Bureau of Consular Affairs has warned women from the United States not to travel alone in India. 
* Burglary was less common in 2006 than in 1953.  It was 38% less common in 2006 (having dropped from 1,47,379 known cases of burglary in 1953 to 91,666 in 2006).
* Robbery had increased by 120% (from 8,407 in 1953 to 18,456 in 2006).
* Riots had increased by 176% (from 20,529 in 1953 to 56,641 in 2006).
* Murder had seriously increased, by 231% (from 9,803 in 1953 to 32,481 in 2006).
* Kidnapping had increased the most, by 356% (from 5,261 to 23,991)

In 2006, 51,02,460 cognizable crimes were committed.  In India, cognizable crimes are serious crimes, where a police officer could make an arrest without needing a warrant first.  Examples of cognizable crimes include rape, murder, and theft. Among the cognizable crimes committed in 2006, there were 18,78,293 Indian Penal Code (IPC) crimes and 32,24,167 Special & Local Laws (SLL) crimes.  The IPC crime rate in 2006 was 167.7 compared to 165.3 in 2005, showing an increase of 1.5% in 2006 over 2005.  SLL crime rate in 2006 was 287.9 compared to 290.5 in 2005, showing a decrease of 0.9% in 2006 over 2005.
* About 34% (one out of three) IPC crimes in India's very large cities happened in only three of those cities: Delhi (16.2%), Mumbai (9.5%), and Bangalore (8.1%). 
* Of the 35 very large cities in India, Indore reported the highest overall crime rate (769.1%).  The second- and third-highest crime rates were from Bhopal (719.5%) and Jaipur (597.1%). 
* Some cities had higher rates of violent crime than the whole country of India.  India's national violent crime rate was 18.4%.  Jammu and Kashmir's violent crime rate was 33.7%; Manipur's was 33.0%; Assam's was 30.4%; and both Daman and Diu's and Pondicherry's were 29.4% 
* Uttar Pradesh reported the highest rate of violent crimes.  Violent crimes in Uttar Pradesh made up 12.1% of the total violent crimes in all of India (24,851 out of 2,05,656).  Violent crimes in Bihar made up 11.8% of violent crimes in India. (24,271 out of 2,05,6556). 
* Among India's 35 very big cities, rapes in Delhi made up 31.2% of total rape cases in the 35 cities (533 out of 1,706).  Madhya Pradesh has reported the highest number of rape cases (2,900), making up 15.0% of the rape cases reported in all of India. 
* Uttar Pradesh reported 16.9% (5,480 out of 32,481) of India's murder cases, and 18.4% (4,997 out of 27,230) of the country's attempted murder cases.

## Notes