states – Page 2 – Pertinent Observations

Rapes in the states of India

Recently the National Crime Records Bureau put out statistics of violent crime in India in 2012. In this post we will look at the incidence of rape in various states.

The following chart plots the number of rapes per 10000 people against the number of murders per 10000 people. The reason we have included the murder numbers here is to control for states which have an overall high rate of violent crime. This chart also has the regression line and the shaded region is the 95% confidence interval around this line.

Source: Crimes in India 2012 report by the National Crime Records Bureau

It is interesting to note that relative to murder rate, Mizoram has the highest case of reported rape in India. In fact, Mizoram has the absolute highest rape rate in India. However, we need to take into account that these are the numbers of reported rape cases. According to reports in the media, a large number of rape cases in India go unreported. So these numbers need to be taken with a handful of salt.

Banking activity and economic activity

Out on Capitalmind, Deepak Shenoy has an excellent post on the penetration of banking services in India, where he points out that 30% of all bank deposits in India are in Mumbai and Delhi. I encourage you to read that post in full.

Having read that, I was interested to see the per capita figures and compare them across states. On a whim, I decided to compare that to per capita state GDP and this is what I got:

Data source: RBI website Note: Maharashtra, Delhi and Goa have been left out because they are outliers. Some other states (Chandigarh, Gujarat and Mizoram) have been left out since their latest GSDP figures are not available — Data source: RBI website
Note: Maharashtra, Delhi and Goa have been left out because they are outliers. Some other states (Chandigarh, Gujarat and Mizoram) have been left out since their latest GSDP figures are not available

While the direction of causality cannot be clearly established, this clearly shows that banking penetration is highly correlated with economic activity.

India State Wise Road Density

Roads are one of the strongest measures of economic activity. The denser the road network in a particular area, the easier it is for people in the area to connect with and trade with each other, thus leading to a higher degree of economic activity. The graph here compares the length of roads across Indian states in 2011.

Source: Statistical Year Book India, 2013

It would also be interesting to see how different states compare in terms of addition to road length between 2009 and 2011. The graph here shows the CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) in total length of roads in each state between 2009 and 2011.