As Nitish Kumar govt faces questions over recent spate of killings in Bihar, the numbers show why | Political Pulse News

While Nitish Kumar is credited across the board for reversing the trend of “jungle raj” in Bihar, over the last decade under him, data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) and the Bihar Police’s state-level figures accessed by The Indian Express shows that crime is rising.

The rise in the overall number of crimes in Bihar has been 80.2% from 2015 to 2024, as per the State Crime Records Bureau (SCRB) data. In contrast, from 2015 to 2022, according to the latest available national-level data, India saw an increase in overall crimes of 23.7%.

[CHART: All crimes in Bihar]

The number of crimes in Bihar has risen every year since 2015 – barring 2016, 2020 (when the Covid-19 pandemic struck), and 2024. The highest year-on-year increase was recorded in 2017, when crime rose by 24.4%. In 2022, there were 3.5 lakh crimes in Bihar, up 23.3% from the previous year. In contrast, crime fell at the national level – by 4.5% in 2022 and 7.7% in 2021.

The latest SCRB data shows the number of crimes rose in 2023 to 3.54 lakh, before falling marginally to 3.52 lakh in 2024. As of June 2025, Bihar has seen 1.91 lakh crimes, more than half what was recorded in 2024.

Since 2015, Bihar has been among the 10 worst states in terms of overall cases of crimes. Adjusted for population, though, Bihar’s rate of crimes per lakh people has been significantly below the national average.

In 2022, Bihar recorded the seventh highest number of crimes at a rate of 277 cases per lakh population. However, India recorded an overall crime rate of 422 cases per lakh population. In fact, after 2015, Delhi reported the highest crime rate for five years, while Kerala ranked the worst for three years. This, however, is also a factor of registration of cases, which could be higher in Delhi and Kerala due to the economic and educational status of its residents.

Though Bihar’s overall crime rate did not exceed the national average in any year since 2015, the NCRB data shows that Bihar’s law and order issues stem from a consistently higher-than-national-average incidence of violent crime.

Take murder, for instance. While overall murder cases have fallen from 3,178 in 2015 to 2,930 in 2022, Bihar has ranked second-highest in the country for the number of murders each year since 2015, behind only the much more populous Uttar Pradesh. The number of attempted murders has risen in Bihar, from 5,981 in 2015 to 8,667 in 2022, putting the state at second-highest after UP again.

According to the latest SCRB data accessed by The Indian Express, Bihar recorded 1,379 murders till June 2025, compared to 2,786 in all of 2024 and 2,863 in 2023.

[CHART: Murders and attempted murders in Bihar]Adjusted for population, in 2022 for example, Bihar recorded 2.3 murders and 6.9 attempted murders per lakh population, exceeding the national average of 2.1 and 4.1, respectively. Over the past decade, while Bihar’s murder rate peaked at 3.1 in 2015, the rate of attempted murders was highest in 2017 at 9.1.

However, owing to its large population, Bihar’s rates of murder and attempted murder make it a middle-of-the-pack state – it ranked among the top-10 states for murder only in 2017 and had the 12th highest murder rate in 2022. However, the state has been in the top five for the rate of attempted numbers every year from 2015 to 2022, suggesting a persistent issue. In 2017, Bihar recorded the second-highest rate of attempted murders.

[CHART: Rate of murders and attempted murders in Bihar]

The most common motive for murder in Bihar has consistently been property disputes, which was the most cited reason in all but one year from 2015 to 2022. In 2018, there were 1,016 murders linked to property disputes, the highest on record in this period. As a share of all murders, property-related cases peaked at 36.7% in 2017. In 2022, personal vendetta was the most common motive for murder at 804 cases or 27.4% of all murders.

In fact, Bihar has reported the most murders linked to property disputes every year from 2015 to 2022, except in 2018 when UP was on top. While Bihar had recorded the fourth-highest number of murders linked to personal vendetta in 2015, it has been first on this measure from 2018 to 2022.

Data shared by the Bihar Police showed that the top motive in 2025 (till June) was personal vendetta, with 513 cases accounting for 37.8% of all murders. Property disputes, at 139 cases, accounted for 10.2% of murders.

[CHART: Top motives for murder in Bihar]

Arms Act violations

Behind the high incidence of murder in Bihar are violations of the Arms Act, 1959. The Bihar Police, in a report published earlier this year, identified the prevalence of fake arms licences, illegal firearms and unauthorised sale of ammunition as the primary reasons behind rising violent crime over the last decade.

From 2015 to 2022, the number of Arms Act violations rose from 1,846 to 3,549 – an increase of 92.3% – with a majority of cases linked to unlicenced weapons. On this front, Bihar has ranked in the worst five states every year from 2015 to 2022, except in 2016 when it was sixth. In the same period, it was UP that recorded the most Arms Act cases.

But as a rate, Bihar has gone from seeing 1.8 Arms Act cases per lakh population in 2015 to 2.8 in 2022, putting it consistently below the national average, which stood at 5.8 in 2022.

[CHART: Arms Act cases and rate in Bihar]

Among other violent crimes, Bihar has reported an increase from 2015 to 2022 in the number of kidnappings (65.9%), robberies (39.2%), cases voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous means (61.3%), and cases of voluntarily causing grievous hurt (17.7%).

In 2022, Bihar figured among the top five states for kidnapping, robberies and voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous means, and in the top 10 for voluntarily causing grievous hurt. Though cases of dacoity and extortion have dropped considerably in Bihar, it ranks third and seventh respectively among the states.

Adjusted for population, Bihar falls below the national average for cases per lakh population for a number of violent crimes. However, in 2022, the state’s 13.1 cases per lakh of voluntarily causing grievous hurt and 9.4 kidnappings per lakh are above the national averages of 6.2 and 7.8, respectively.

But as per the Bureau of Police Research and Development, which falls under the Union Home Ministry, Bihar has the most stretched police force in the country as of January 2023. At 114.57 police personnel per lakh population, Bihar has the lowest such ratio among the states and higher than only the UT of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu. With a sanctioned strength of 1.44 lakh, Bihar’s police force is understaffed with as many as 42,000 vacancies, which is the third-largest such deficit among all states.

This is despite spending a larger share of its Budgetary outlay on the police than states like Maharashtra, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Telangana in 2022-23 and having the seventh highest number of police stations in the country.