Amit Shah at PWD Ground, Kumarghat, Tripura
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) National President, Amit Shah, visited Left ruled Tripura earlier in May setting his sights on sweeping assembly elections due in early 2018.
Shah, who is seen as BJP’s chief strategist and key to its electoral success, launched a scathing attack on Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar.
Shah said that Tripura has the highest rate of crimes against women in the country and 25% of the literate population of the state is unemployed.
BOOM analysed official data to fact check his statements. Below is our analysis:
CLAIM 1 : Tripura has the highest rate of crimes against women in the country
BOOM's analysis found it to be false.
Though Tripura is among the 15 states / union territories with high rates of crimes against women in the country, it does not top the list, according to 2015 data of National Crime Records Bureau.
Rate of crimes against women refers to crimes committed against women reported per 1,00,000 female population.
Delhi (184.3) has the highest rate of violence against women followed by the north eastern state of Assam (148.2) and Telengana (83.1). Tripura has recorded a rate of 68.2 which is above the national crime rate of 53.9.
Source: Crime in India 2015, NCRB
The BJP chief also said that 919 cases of crimes against women were reported in 10 months in Tripura.
It was not clear from his speech which months he was referring to. However, a study of crimes against women by Tripura Police shows that the number of crimes against women in 2016 reported between January to November has decreased by 20% from that of 2015.
Source: Tripura Police
CLAIM 2 : 25% of the literate population of the state is unemployed
BOOM found that government data shows unemployment among graduates in Tripura is about 23 percent, which is close to what Amit Shah said.
Out of every 1000 graduates in Tripura 228 are unemployed, according to the 5th Annual Employment- Unemployment Survey (2015-16) by the Ministry of Labour and Employment. That means 22.8% of graduates in Tripura are unemployed.
Out of every 1000 graduates in India, 100 (10%) are unemployed.
We assume that by “literate population” (see BJP’s tweet above), Shah is referring to the population with graduate level qualification.
Tripura ranks as the 4th worst state in terms of unemployment among graduates in the country.
Source: Employment - Unemployment Survey (2015-16), Ministry of Labour and Employment
(Note: A previous version of the story incorrectly said '990 cases of crimes against women were reported in 10 months'. The error is regretted.)