A New Perspective on Violent Crime Burden Index: Evidence from Indian Districts

Given limited resource availability in a developing nation like India, faced with high incidences of crime, it is important
to optimize on the resources spent in combating crime by channelling them to proper direction. This requires an understanding
of the actual and overall level of crime across India. Our paper provides a complete understanding of the various indicators
of violent crime and the determinants of these crimes in India using district level data for three census years, namely, 1981,
1991 and 2001. We construct three alternative crime-burden indices. Including a variable like voter turnout in state election
at the district level, we document significant impact of public awareness to reduce and combat crime. The constructed crime
burden index shows that states located in northern parts of India have more incidences of crime compared to states in the
south. We also find that our estimated crime-burden indices tend to report in general a higher level of crime-burden than
the average based index. This suggests controlling for the factors beyond population while constructing the aggregate crime-burden
index for any country is essential. Our work although is limited to the Indian data, we however, believe that this can be
easily applied to various other countries.