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NCRB goofed up on Section 66A stats
NEW DELHI: The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) on Friday conceded that its national crime statistics for 2014 and 2015 had misreported cases registered under
NEW DELHI: The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) on Friday conceded that its national crime statistics for 2014 and 2015 had misreported cases registered under Section 66A of the IT Act that was scrapped by the Supreme Court last year.
The NCRB’s Crime in India report had put the number of people arrested under Section 66A at 3,137 arrests in 2015 and 2,423 in 2014. This implied that the police arrested, on an average, eight people every day in 2015 under a provision scrapped by Supreme Court for violating the constitutional freedom of speech and expression. Section 66A prescribed a three-year jail term for online content that could be construed to be offensive or false.
The NCRB reviewed figures after the HT report, ‘SC scrapped it, but thousands held last year under dead cyber law’, provoked outrage. Rajya Sabha MP, Rajeev Chandrasekhar also wrote to the Prime Minister to call for an end to the abuse of the provision. By Friday, the NC RB putout ar a re corrigendum on its website to fix the errors, attributing them to a glitch.
Told about there view, Chandrasekhar told HT he was happy to know the provision wasn’ t as abused as the NC RB report indicated. But he stressed the episode had an important lesson for NC RB. “Given that NC R Bis the repository of all crime data that forms the basis for public opinion and policy decisions, it needs to be a lot more circumspect about the integrity of the data it produces,” he said.
The review indicated that the NC RB collected a combined figure for Section 66 — relating to unauthorised access to a computer or an account — and Section 66A from state police forces. But this combined figure was attributed to Section 66A only. An inquiry revealed that a software programmer who wrote the programme apparently knocked out Section 66 as the two sections did not fit in. The programmer did not realise how it would impact the data integrity.
IMPLICATIONS
Since the error crept in 2014, the NCRB report for last year also has the same inaccuracy. But it had gone undetected and there was no attempt at NCRB to review its figures and procedures.
When BJD MP Tathagata Satpathy asked the government how many were booked under Section 66A, the then IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad relied on the same set of figures. Parliament was told that 4,037 cases had been registered under Section 66A in 2014. This, too, was an exaggeration. Since the state crime records bureau also use the same NCRB software, corresponding state-level reports also suffer from the same anomaly vis-à-vis Section 66A.
PROBLEMS ELSEWHERE
NCRB officials also detected issues with regard to another dataset — this was due to faulty reporting by state police. According to the report, the courts compounded hundreds of cases related to murder and rape. If this was true, it also would be in violation of SC guidelines that restrict high courts from dismissing cases involving heinous crimes even if the victim and accused arrive at a compromise. When HT pointed this out, an NCRB official said it could be a mistake in reporting from states.
