HomeCurrent AffairsFact Check: The News Reports Related to Missing Women from Gujarat are...

Fact Check: The News Reports Related to Missing Women from Gujarat are Misleading

Some News reports claim that the missing of more than forty thousand women from Gujarat in the last five years is floating among anti-Modi media without any fact check. First of all the data of 41,621 missing women is not the data of missing women from Gujarat. Instead, this data is the number of registered police reports for missing women.

The way this news has been projected as if Gujarat has the highest number of missing women across India in the last five years. But the truth is that the highest number of missing women is from Maharashtra and that is 162348. Maharashtra is followed by West Bengal with 143102 missing women from the state. There are at least ten states and union territories where the total number of missing women registered with the police is higher than in Gujarat. 

Read This Too: How Biased Are Maharashtra & Gujarati Police System?

The news first surfaced in ‘The New Indian Express’ on the morning of Sunday, 07 May 2023. Within a few hours, several other media houses in different languages picked up the news without doing any fact-checks. Many well-known journalists including Ravish Kumar shared this news over social media with words of attack on Modi and the Gujarat model. The so-called fact-checkers of Indian media are still silent on this while others project this false data to oppose the movie titled ‘The Kerala Story‘.

The moment this news with the false claim of an unimaginable missing number of women from Gujarat floated in media and social media, Pro-Congress media houses and individual journalists began sharing the news without even doing a simple fact check of the data from the website of NCRB or the report published by NCRB regarding the same. NCRB has been publishing this data since at least 2016

Missing Vs Registered for Missing:

According to the data published by NCRB since 2016, out of these 41,621 police reports related to missing women in Gujarat, around 87% per cent were already solved and women were recovered or traced. At the time of the compilation of the last report, there were only 5409 women who were missing untraced from the State of Gujarat.

There are ten other states in India that have a higher number of missing and still untraced women. This includes 33665 in West Bengal, 33100 in Madhya Pradesh, and 23157 in Maharashtra. The proportion of recovered/traced missing women in Gujarat is much higher than in 15 other Indian states. The proportion of recovered/traced missing women in Gujarat is 87% while it is only 40.10% in Punjab and 48.48% in Odisha. 

The total number of both traced and untraced missing women in the year 2020 in Gujarat was 13,162 while the number in other states like Maharashtra, West Bengal, Odisha, Delhi and Rajasthan were 63252, 63040, 29321, 26987 and 24350 respectively. Out of these 13,162 missing reports 8290 were reported during the year 2020 while 4872 were from the previous years and were still recovered or untraced in 2020. Out of these 13,162 cases registered in different police stations in Gujarat, 7753 women were traced or recovered by the Gujarat Police during the year 2020 while the rest of the 5409 women were still missing at the end of the year 2020. 

Beyond Gujarat:

Thus Gujarat is not the worst state either in terms of the average number of missing women found missing every year or the average number of missing women who remained unrecovered or untraced till the end of the particular year. In fact, Gujarat is one of the few states in India that managed to reduce the number of incidents related to missing women during the year 2020 in comparison to previous years. 

The total number of registered police cases related to missing women in Gujarat during 2020 was 8290 while it was 9268 during the year 2019, 9246 in 2018, 7712 in 2017 and 7105 during 2016. Thus Gujarat managed to reduce the number of missing women for the first time since 2016. In comparison to Gujarat, there are at least five states in India that witnessed an increase rather than a decrease in the number of reports related to missing women during the year 2020 in comparison to previous years. This includes Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Puducherry. 

Read This Too: Why the ‘Gujarat Model of Development’ Has Seen the Highest COVID-19 Fatality Rate

When one compares the different aspects of this data related to missing women in India with the total female population of the state one finds that the condition of Gujarat is much better than many states. According to the India Census 2011 the population of the favourite state for left-liberals, Kerala was almost half of the total population of Gujarat while the total number of missing women reported in Kerala during the last five years was 34079. This is far more than the half of 41,612 cases found in Gujarat. Thus the total number of missing women in proportion to the total population of the state is higher in Kerala than in Gujarat during the last five years. 

Out of every 10,000 women from Gujarat, 14.38 women were reported missing in the last 5 years. This proportion is lower than at least 16 Indian states and union territories. This includes Delhi, Chandigarh, West Bengal, Tripura, Tamil Nadu, Sikkim, Rajasthan, Odisha, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Goa, and Chhattisgarh. This highest is in Delhi where out of every 10000 women population 79.13 women were reported missing during last five years. 

Similarly, out of every 10,000 women population in Gujarat, the case of number of unrecovered or untraced women reported missing by the end of the year 2020 is 1.87 while the proportion for Chandigarh, Delhi, Odisha and Chhattisgarh is 24.26, 21.29, 11.07 and 7.87 respectively. The proportion of Gujarat is lower than at least 16 other Indian states and union territories. 

The above data show how this is one of the several attempts by anti-Modi forces in India to tarnish the image of Modi and the Gujarat Model that they were unsuccessfully trying since 2013 when Modi emerged as the tallest leader of India. Gujarat emerged as the model of not just development but also governance for India to follow since Modi became chief minister of the state in 2001. 

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Pankaj Kumar Kapadia
Pankaj Kumar Kapadia
The writer is an IIT Delhi graduate and executive member of Purvanchal Morcha, BJP Delhi unit. Views are personal
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