After a decline in Covid-hit 2020, economic offences increase 19% in 2021

After a dip in 2020, the number of economic offences rose 19.4 per cent to 174,013 cases in 2021, according to the Crime in India report by the National Crime Records Bureau.

The data shows that there was a marginal dip in the pendency of cases in 2021 at 96.6 per cent compared with 96.8 per cent in 2020, but this was still three percentage points higher than 93.6 per cent recorded in 2019.

Economic offences include all offences of criminal breach of trust, counterfeiting, forgery, cheating, and fraud.

States

Among the states, the highest number of instances were recorded in Rajasthan (23,757), followed by Telangana (20,759), Uttar Pradesh (20,026), Maharashtra (15,550), and Assam (11,809).

Though the number of cases declined 11.7 per cent to 23,757 cases in 2021 in Rajasthan from 26,920 cases in 2019, the state has consistently had the highest share of economic offences in the country for the past three years.

Telangana saw the sharpest increase in such offences, with the number of cases shooting up 81.1 per cent from 11,465 in 2019 to 20,759 in 2021.

While the number of cases have increased steadily over the past five years, the rate of filing chargesheets – which is the percentage of cases for which a charge sheet is filed – has declined by 2.9 percentage points since 2016.

In fact, the rate of filing was the lowest in 2021 at 51.9 per cent, down from 54.8 per cent in 2016 and 53.5 per cent in 2020.

Conviction rates

There has been an improvement in conviction rates in the past five years.

While in 2016, the conviction rate was 21.4 per cent, it has increased to 29.4 per cent in 2021.

This was, however, lower than the 33.6 per cent conviction rate reported in 2020.