At the end of 2014, India’s courts had 102,208 cases of caste atrocities against Dalits still waiting for a verdict, the National Crime Records Bureau’s court table for that year shows. At the end of 2024 they had 339,853, the 2024 edition shows: 3.3 times as many. In the same ten years, the number of trials courts finished in a year barely moved, from 16,627 in 2014 to 16,973 in 2024.

Dalits are the communities once branded “untouchable” under the caste order; Indian law lists them as Scheduled Castes (SCs). The NCRB, the crime-data agency of India’s central government, publishes their cases each year in Crime in India, its annual count of crime recorded by the police. Its tables track “atrocities”: crimes against SCs by people who are not SCs or Scheduled Tribes (STs, the legal category for Adivasi, or Indigenous, communities), registered under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, India’s 1989 law against caste violence.

From The Dalit Project Data

The backlog grew every year: cases still pending at the year’s end went from 113,393 in 2015 to 339,853 in 2024

Cases before the courts still pending trial on 31 December, all India, 2015 to 2024.

Note: 2024 counts crimes under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) instead of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), so it may not compare directly with earlier years. A rising count can also mean more cases registered, not only slower courts: NCRB counts what the police register.

Source: National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Crime in India, 2015 to 2024 editions, accessed 8 Oct 2026.

See this chart in Atrocity Justice: the conviction gap, on The Dalit Project Data

The figures below run across eleven editions of those tables, 2014 to 2024; the charts, from The Dalit Project Data’s Atrocity Justice series, start in 2015. For 2024 alone, state by state, see our analysis of the 2024 edition.

One case behind the numbers

On 13 January 2015, a sessions court (the district-level court that tries serious crimes) in Jehanabad district, in central Bihar in eastern India, acquitted all 24 people tried over the 1999 killing of Dalit villagers at Shankar Bigha, citing “lack of evidence”, the Dubai newspaper Gulf News reported. Reports put the dead at 23 or 22. The killings were allegedly carried out by members of the Ranvir Sena, an outlawed militia of landlords from castes ranked above Dalits, the Indian news agency IANS reported. The trial had lasted 16 years. According to reports cited by Gulf News, all 49 witnesses produced in court turned hostile.

“All these years, I had kept waiting for justice hoping the accused persons will be served harsh punishment; instead they have been acquitted. I am totally hopeless now,” Rajmani Devi, whose husband and three other relatives were killed, told Gulf News. Etwaria Devi, who lost her husband, told IANS: “There is no one to do justice to the poor like us. We have only pain and misery in our life.”

The NCRB’s court tables count verdicts like this one only as numbers in a column of acquittals. They record how many trials end and how, not why.

What the NCRB counts

Three counting rules shape every trend below.

It counts registered police cases. Each case counted is a registered First Information Report (FIR), the police complaint that opens a criminal case. “Only police recorded crime cases are being captured”, the bureau states. Under its “principal offence rule”, an FIR listing several offences is counted once, under the one that carries the heaviest punishment, it explains. A complaint the police never register is not in the data at all.

Its atrocity tables leave out cases filed only under the penal code. Since the 2016 edition, cases “under only IPC (without SC/ST Act)”, the Indian Penal Code, have been excluded, the footnote to Table 7A.1 says. The change is visible in the numbers. The 2014 edition counted 47,064 crimes against SCs, including penal-code cases without the Atrocities Act and cases under other laws, its Table 7.1 shows. The 2016 edition restated 2014 on the narrower basis as 40,401 cases. All the counts below use the narrower basis.

It publishes what the states send. The NCRB “is not responsible for authenticity” of state data, it says. The 2019 count shows what that can mean. The 2019 edition recorded 45,935 cases, but data from West Bengal, in eastern India, had not arrived in time, so the bureau reused West Bengal’s 2018 figure of 119, the table’s footnote says. The 2020 edition printed 145 for West Bengal in 2019 and a national total of 45,961. The difference between the two figures in circulation, 26 cases, is exactly the change in West Bengal’s figure (145 − 119). Both appear in later reporting; 45,961 is the revised figure.

Registered cases rose from 40,401 in 2014 to a peak of 57,789 in 2023, then fell to 55,698 in 2024, the 2024 edition shows. That 38% rise over ten years can mean more attacks, more complaints, or more complaints accepted by police, and the tables cannot separate the three. The National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), founded in 1998 as “a national movement of Dalit human rights defenders, activists, academics, and civil society organizations”, in its own description, warns that atrocities are often underreported, and that “the officially recorded figures are likely to underestimate the true extent of the violence,” in its 2026 review of NCRB data. Lower figures in some states, it adds, could result from “refusal to register cases, rather than a genuine reduction in violence.”

The court figures raise a different question. Whatever drove registration, they show what the courts did with the cases police sent them.

Ten years of the court pipeline

From The Dalit Project Data

Of 357,009 cases before the courts in 2024, 16,973 finished trial and 5,757 ended in conviction

Crimes against Scheduled Castes, all India, 2024: each stage as a count of cases.

  1. Before the courts357,009
    Carried over from earlier years plus newly sent for trial.
  2. Trial finished16,973
    The rest: 339,853 still pending, 183 ended without a trial.
  3. Convicted5,757
    The rest of the finished trials, 11,216, ended in acquittal or discharge.

Note: The cases before the courts include cases carried over from earlier years, so the year’s convictions are not only of cases sent for trial that year.

Source: National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Crime in India 2024, Table 7A.6. Crimes against Scheduled Castes, accessed 8 Oct 2026.

See this chart in Atrocity Justice: the conviction gap, on The Dalit Project Data

Police sent 29,327 cases to trial in 2014 and 45,023 in 2024, a 54% increase, the court tables for 2014 and 2024 show. The courts’ output did not follow. They finished between 12,000 and 17,000 trials in most years, with a low of 7,637 in 2020, the 2020 table shows, and a high of 20,297 in 2023. Every year, fewer cases left the courts than arrived.

The result is a queue that lengthens every year. In 2014, trials finished in 13.9% of the cases before the courts. In 2024, they finished in 4.8%. At 2014’s pace, counting every case the courts disposed of with or without a trial, they would have needed about six years to clear that year’s backlog if no new case arrived. At 2024’s pace, they would need about 20.

3.3 times: the growth in India’s court backlog of caste-atrocity cases between the end of 2014 (102,208) and the end of 2024 (339,853) — NCRB, Crime in India 2014, Table 7.4; 2024, Table 7A.6

A conviction rate that does not trend

A long, low cream-coloured court building on a riverbank, seen across grey water under an overcast sky
The Patna Civil Court in Bihar, eastern India, seen across the river. File photo. Neil Satyam
iCC BY-SA 3.0· croppedOriginal on Wikimedia Commons

The NCRB’s conviction rate counts convictions as a share of finished trials, by its definition. It was 28.4% in 2014 and 33.9% in 2024. In between it ranged from 25.7% in 2016 to 42.4% in 2020, the year courts finished the fewest trials. Pooled across the eleven years, 49,580 of 156,110 finished trials ended in conviction: 31.8%. Counted across every case before the courts, not only finished trials, 5,757 of 357,009 cases ended in conviction in 2024: 1.6%.

Acquittals and discharges (a court releasing an accused without a full trial verdict) outnumbered convictions in every year. In 2014, 11,911 trials ended in acquittal or discharge against 4,716 convictions, about two and a half to one, the 2014 table shows. In 2024 the figures were 11,216 against 5,757, about two to one, the 2024 table shows. Over the eleven years the totals were 106,530 against 49,580.

The NCDHR reads the same tables as a failure across the whole chain of a case:

“This widening gap between conviction and acquittal reflects the weakness of the justice delivery process at multiple levels from investigation and evidence gathering to prosecution and judicial scrutiny.” National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, Five Years of Caste Based Atrocity (2026)

Where the gap sits

At the end of 2024, the ten largest court backlogs were in Uttar Pradesh, in the north; Bihar and Odisha, in the east; Madhya Pradesh, in central India; Rajasthan, in the north-west; Maharashtra and Gujarat, in the west; and Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, in the south, the 2024 court table shows.

From The Dalit Project Data

Five States held 75% of the cases still pending at the end of 2024

Cases pending trial at the end of 2024, by State/UT, largest ten. Every State and UT is in the full table on The Dalit Project Data’s Atrocity Justice page.

  1. Uttar Pradesh93,689
  2. Bihar71,111
  3. Madhya Pradesh41,557
  4. Rajasthan24,469
  5. Odisha23,873
  6. Maharashtra18,389
  7. Gujarat14,134
  8. Karnataka12,062
  9. Andhra Pradesh8,118
  10. Tamil Nadu7,779

Note: These are counts, not rates: a State that registers more cases also holds more pending ones. The share of each State’s cases still pending is on The Dalit Project Data’s Atrocity Justice page. NCRB’s note to the table: “States/UTs may not be compared purely on the basis of crime figures”.

Source: National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Crime in India 2024, Table 7A.6. Crimes against Scheduled Castes, accessed 8 Oct 2026.

See this chart in Atrocity Justice: the conviction gap, on The Dalit Project Data

The state tables, available on the same basis from the 2016 edition, show the national rate is an average of very different courts. From 2016 to 2024, courts in Uttar Pradesh, in the north, convicted in 19,310 of 28,182 finished trials, 68.5%, and produced 47% of all convictions in India, Dalit Project calculations from the nine court tables show (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024). In the rest of the country, 21,435 of 96,158 finished trials ended in conviction: 22.3%.

From The Dalit Project Data

Where trials finished, NCRB’s conviction rate ranged from 1.8% in West Bengal to 73.3% in Uttar Pradesh

NCRB conviction rate, 2024: convictions out of trials that finished, per cent, by State/UT, highest first.

  1. Uttar PradeshAll India 33.9%73.3%
  2. Jharkhand42.2%
  3. Uttarakhand38.5%
  4. Rajasthan36.9%
  5. Bihar36.1%
  6. Madhya Pradesh35.6%
  7. Chhattisgarh30.2%
  8. Delhi23.1%
  9. Haryana18.2%
  10. Tamil Nadu11.9%
  11. Kerala10.8%
  12. Odisha10.8%
  13. Maharashtra9.3%
  14. Punjab5.7%
  15. Gujarat5.4%
  16. Himachal Pradesh4.8%
  17. Telangana3.7%
  18. Karnataka3.2%
  19. Andhra Pradesh2.4%
  20. West Bengal1.8%

Note: States and UTs where fewer than 5 trials finished are left out. NCRB’s note to the table: “States/UTs may not be compared purely on the basis of crime figures”.

Source: National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Crime in India 2024, Table 7A.6. Crimes against Scheduled Castes, accessed 8 Oct 2026.

See this chart in Atrocity Justice: the conviction gap, on The Dalit Project Data

In the south and west, conviction is rare in every year. Over the same nine years, courts in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, in the south, and Gujarat, in the west, recorded some of the lowest rates in India. Karnataka’s courts convicted in 205 of 6,652 finished trials (3.1%), Andhra Pradesh’s in 313 of 6,877 (4.6%), Gujarat’s in 169 of 3,684 (4.6%) and Telangana’s in 299 of 5,125 (5.8%). In Odisha, in the east, it was 111 of 2,712 (4.1%). In none of the nine years did Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat or Telangana convict in more than 11% of finished trials.

Bihar, in the east, rarely finishes a trial. Its courts completed 4,204 trials in nine years. Its backlog at the end of 2024 was 71,111 cases, up from 26,685 at the end of 2016, the 2016 and 2024 tables show. In no year since 2017 did it finish trials in more than 2% of the cases before its courts.

Backlogs grew in every one of the ten states. Odisha’s grew 3.4 times, Madhya Pradesh’s 3.2 times and Andhra Pradesh’s 3.1 times.

For Shankar Bigha’s families, the wait was 16 years. The NCDHR, writing of the five years to 2023, put the cost of such waits in one sentence:

“For Dalit survivors, this is not merely a matter of numbers it translates to years of waiting, social pressure, and an enduring sense of injustice.” National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, Five Years of Caste Based Atrocity (2026)

What the data can’t tell us

Whether violence rose. The registered count measures what reached a police register. It rose by 38% from 2014 to 2024, but the tables cannot split that rise between more attacks and more registration.

Why trials end in acquittal. The tables record outcomes, not reasons. They don’t say whether witnesses turned hostile, as reports said they did at Shankar Bigha, whether the case had a special court or a special prosecutor, or whether the investigation was weak.

How long each case took. The chapter on crimes against SCs records how many cases are pending, not for how long.

Anything about the people involved. The counts are of cases, not of the people harmed or accused in them.

The data

The national court figures from 2015, and every state’s and union territory’s for 2024, are on The Dalit Project Data’s Atrocity Justice page, with the NCRB table behind each and how they were read.

All crime figures are from the National Crime Records Bureau’s Crime in India, editions 2014 to 2024, read from the NCRB’s published tables. Shares of cases finished, years to clear the backlog, pooled rates and the rates without Uttar Pradesh are The Dalit Project’s calculations from those tables.

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