An economic analysis of ipc crimes and sll crimes in india

Crime is the violation of the rules and regulations enforced by the society from time to time for which definite punishment is prescribed by law. Members in every society are expected to act according to its established norms and laws. But when an individual finds it difficult or impossible to satisfy his wants and desires in a direct and socially accepted manner, he encounters the alternative of renouncing his motive or attempting to find a substitute satisfaction. When good solutions are not available, he engages himself in anti-social behaviour of criminal nature. The area of crime and economic development has remained a little too far away from the purview of scholars and researchers in the sense that the first serious attempt at an econometric analysis related to this area was by the economist Isaac Ehrlich (1973). There is another reason why protection from violence is a capability of much interest: it does not necessarily improve as income levels rise. Many other basic capabilities, such as nutrition, longevity, and literacy, are positively related to per capita income and tend to improve with economic growth even in the absence of direct intervention. Dealing with violence in a society is, therefore, intrinsically a matter of public action. The latter, in turn, calls for careful investigation of the causes of violence. War-torn zones are not the best site for a household survey, and even basic data on criminal violence in developing countries are seldom available in a convenient and reliable form. Thus this study is a trivial attempt to study the impact of certain macro economic factors on crime(IPC and SLL both). Keeping this in mind it was decided to analyse the IPC and SLL crimes in India over a period of time with respect to some prominent macro-economic variables like urban population as percent of total population, GDP per capita PPP, unemployment rate. The rest of the article is organized into four sections: Section II contains the causes and trends of IPC and SLL crime in India. The theoretical framework is present in section III. The methodology employed and estimation results are contained in section IV. Section V concludes with lessons for policy. The results so obtained clarified that 64 per cent of the variations in the dependent variable are explained by the three predictor variables. But it is clear from the table of coefficients that only urban population as per cent of total population and GDP per capita PPP are significantly important variables having an impact on Total All India Crime(IPC +SLL). It was observed that the urban population as percent of total population seemed to have a significant impact on the following types of IPC Crimes – rape, kidnapping & abduction, dacoity, preparation of dacoity, robbery, theft, criminal breach of trust, cheating, counterfeiting, hurt/ grievious hurt, dowry deaths, assault on women with intent to outrage her modesty, causing death by negligence, other IPC crimes and cruelty by husband his relatives. Whereas the IPC crimes like murder, attempt to commit murder, C H not amounting to murder, burglary, riots, arson, importation of girls from foreign country and insult to modesty of women turned out to be statistically insignificant. , it was observed that excise Act, Explosives Act, Immoral Traffic Act, Indian Railway Act, Protection of Civil Rights Act, Indian Passport Act, Essential commodity Act, Terrorism and Disruption Act, Dowry Prohibition Act, Indecent Representation of Women Act, Copyright Act and Forest Act were statistically significant. Keywords: IPC crime, SLL crime, GDP, Urban population, dynamics of crime.