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Two readings of one number
Every year India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), a central government agency, counts crimes against Scheduled Castes (SCs): the communities listed under the Constitution for protection and reservation, most of them Dalits. Its count covers cases registered under the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, India’s anti-atrocity law, and only crimes “committed against SCs by Non-SCs/STs”, as the table’s own note puts it (Crime in India 2024, vol. II, Table 7A.1).
By that count, Tamil Nadu registered 1,377 cases in 2021, 1,761 in 2022, 1,921 in 2023 and 1,777 in 2024 (Crime in India 2023, vol. II, Table 7A.1; 2024, Table 7A.1). That is a rise of 29% in three years, and a fall of 7.5% in the latest one.
Measured against population, the picture turns. Tamil Nadu had about 14.4 million Scheduled Caste people in the 2011 Census, the population the table uses, and its 2024 rate was 12.3 cases per 100,000 of them. The national rate was 27.7. The rate was 35.0 in Kerala, Tamil Nadu’s neighbour, 57.3 in Rajasthan and 68.5 in Madhya Pradesh, the same table shows.
So on one reading the state registers far fewer crimes against Scheduled Castes, for its size, than most of India, and on another its count has grown. The NCRB’s own tables warn that “States/UTs may not be compared purely on the basis of crime figures”. Neither reading settles what happened on the ground, because a registered case counts what reaches a police station and is written up under this law. A rising count is consistent with more violence, more reporting, or both, and a low rate can mean less violence, or fewer cases registered.
Who records what
Two records in Tamil Nadu do not always agree. A 2022 study by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), a rights group, Tamil Nadu Scorecard 2021, compared the NCRB’s figures with those kept by the state’s nodal officer for the anti-atrocity law and found “a divergence” between them, The News Minute reported. The same study found that fewer than 30% of chargesheets, the police’s formal charges, were filed on time.
The NCRB’s own tables show how the police closed the cases they did register. In 2024, Tamil Nadu’s police filed chargesheets in 84.3% of the cases they disposed of that year, including cases carried over from earlier years, above the national 82.0%. They closed none as “false”. They closed 259 as a “mistake of fact or of law or civil dispute” (Table 7A.4).
Where cases stop
The sharper finding is in the courts. In 2024, Tamil Nadu’s courts had 8,475 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes for trial, including those carried over from earlier years. They finished trials in 679 and convicted in 81, a conviction rate of 11.9%. At the year’s end 7,779 cases, 91.8%, were still waiting for a verdict (Table 7A.6). Across India, the conviction rate was 33.9% and 95.2% of cases were pending.
A low conviction rate does not show that the accused were guilty, or innocent. It shows that few of the trials that do finish end in a conviction. India’s court backlog for these cases has tripled in ten years (The conviction gap), and Tamil Nadu’s rate of conviction is about a third of the national one.
Vengaivayal
In December 2022, Dalit children in Vengaivayal, a village in Pudukkottai district, fell ill, and villagers found human excreta in the overhead tank that supplied their homes, The News Minute reported. A case was registered under the anti-atrocity law. In the state Assembly on 11 January 2023, Chief Minister M.K. Stalin said the incident “has revealed that untouchability based on caste discrimination is present here and there” and called it “truly regrettable, reprehensible, and disgraceful” (same report).
Two years later, in January 2025, the state police’s Crime Branch-Criminal Investigation Department (CB-CID) filed a chargesheet against three men from the Dalit colony itself, saying the motive was a personal grievance against the husband of the panchayat (village council) president, Deccan Herald reported. Allies of the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), among them the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK), a Dalit party, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), rejected the finding and asked for an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the national police agency. VCK leader Thol. Thirumavalavan said he suspected that the CB-CID had “implicated” three Dalit residents to close the case (same report). The state government defended the investigation, saying the CB-CID had examined about 397 witnesses and analysed mobile-phone data, Deccan Herald reported.
On 3 February 2025, the special court for anti-atrocity cases in Pudukkottai transferred the case to an ordinary magistrate’s court, the Judicial Magistrate Court-II, after finding “no motive under the SC/ST Act”, the public prosecutor said, DT Next reported. The complainant contested the removal of the anti-atrocity charges, The News Minute reported, and Dalit residents of Vengaivayal had boycotted the April 2024 general election over what they called the administration’s inaction (same report). In September 2026, the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court, the state’s highest court, dismissed a petition, filed in 2023, to transfer the investigation to the CBI, after the state told it the CB-CID had filed its chargesheet before the trial court (DT Next, 16 September 2026).
The NCRB’s atrocity count covers only crimes by people outside the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. In Vengaivayal, the CB-CID asked for the transfer because, it said, those involved were from the same community, and the special court found no motive under the anti-atrocity law, DT Next reported. On this record, who the police find to be the accused can decide whether a case is tried as an atrocity at all.
Voices from the state
In 2021, when Witness for Justice, a Madurai group that works with Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities, wrote to the Chief Minister asking for reform of the state’s monitoring of the law, its executive director, the advocate I. Pandiyan, said that past failures to arrange the law’s implementation had “resulted in the growing number of caste atrocities and least conviction rate under the SC/ST Act”, The News Minute reported.
“Terms like social justice, Periyar land, and atheism act as shields and prevent outsiders from seeing what is happening in the state. If the shields are taken down, they will realise that Tamil Nadu is no different from the rest of the country.”
— Shalin Maria Lawrence, Dalit rights activist and writer, at a Dalit Intellectual Collective consultation in Chennai, reported by The News Minute, 2024
The state’s defence
The government points to institutions. In February 2024 the Assembly passed a bill for a Development Action Plan for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, to earmark welfare spending “proportionate to their population”, Deccan Herald reported. When the PUCL study was published, it found, The News Minute reported, that each district had a Social Justice and Human Rights unit to enforce the anti-atrocity law, and that the state had 30 courts designated to try such cases, 17 of them exclusive special courts.
The implications
The institutions the state points to sit beside the courts’ own record: 81 convictions in the 679 trials finished in 2024, and 7,779 cases still waiting for a verdict at the year’s end.
Tamil Nadu’s police register crimes against Scheduled Castes under the anti-atrocity law at less than half the national rate, and file charges in most of the cases they close. Its courts finish few trials and convict in about one of every eight they finish. The records do not say whether the low rate reflects fewer attacks or fewer complaints written up. They do show that Tamil Nadu’s courts recorded a conviction rate about a third of the national one.
What to watch: the Vengaivayal case in the Pudukkottai magistrate’s court, now that the High Court has closed the route to a CBI inquiry, and whether the 7,779 cases pending at the end of 2024 begin to move in the NCRB’s next edition.
