In the run-up to the Bihar Assembly elections, a spate of murders had sparked a political row over law and order in the state.
The Opposition Mahagathbandhan has long been attacking the Nitish Kumar-led NDA government, with RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav claiming that Bihar has descended into “chaos” under the leadership of an “unconscious CM”. Even Chirag Paswan, who heads the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) and is a part of the NDA, had said that recent incidents of violent crimes demonstrated the “complete collapse of law and order in Bihar”.
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 show that crimes have been on the rise in the state.
The increase 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. From 2015 to 2023, according to the latest available national-level data, India saw an increase in overall crimes of 32.5%.
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 crimes rose by 24.4%. In 2022, there were 3.48 lakh crimes in Bihar, up 23.3% from the previous year. In 2023, the number of crimes in Bihar rose by 1.63% from the previous year to 3.54 lakh. In contrast, crimes fell at the national level by 4.5% in 2022 before rising by 7.15% in 2023.
The latest SCRB data shows the number of crimes in Bihar rose in 2023 to 3.54 lakh, before falling marginally to 3.52 lakh 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 2023, Bihar recorded the 18th highest number of crimes at a rate of 277.5 cases per lakh population, among the states. However, India recorded an overall crime rate of 448 cases per lakh population.
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 2,862 in 2023, 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 8,657 in 2023, putting the state at second-highest after West Bengal.
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.
Adjusted for population, in 2023 for example, Bihar recorded 2.2 murders and 6.8 attempted murders per lakh population, exceeding the national average of 2 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 11th highest murder rate in 2023. However, the state has been in the top five for the rate of attempted murders every year from 2015 to 2023, suggesting a persistent issue.
The most common motive for murder in Bihar has consistently been property disputes, which was the most cited reason in all but two years from 2015 to 2023. 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 and 2023, personal vendetta was the most common motive for murder at 804 cases (27.4% of all murders) and 703 (24.6%), respectively.
In fact, Bihar has reported the most murders linked to property disputes every year from 2015 to 2023, 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 count from 2018 to 2023.