Cybercrime, Complaint Attrition and Enforcement Outcomes in Cyberstalking and Online Harassment: Analysis of National and Haryana Official Statistics, 2019–2025

Abstract

Background: Cyberstalking and online harassment are widely reported to be under-recorded in India, but the size of the gap between victimisation, complaint, registration and conviction has rarely been quantified from official sources.

Objective: To analyse national and Haryana official statistics for 2019–2025 to describe trends in recorded cybercrime and in the cyber stalking/bullying head, to measure the attrition between complaints and registered cases, and to assess enforcement outcomes.

Methods: A descriptive analysis of secondary data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) Crime in India reports, the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCRP), parliamentary replies and Haryana Police statements, using growth rates, compound annual growth rates, shares, conversion ratios and rates per lakh population. Figures that could not be reconciled across sources were excluded or tested in sensitivity checks.

Results: NCRB-registered cyber crime rose from 44,735 cases (2019) to 86,420 (2023), an increase of 93.2% (17.9% a year), while the cyber stalking/bullying head rose only from 771 to 1,305 (69.3%), and its share of all cyber crime fell from 1.7% to 1.5%. Cyber fraud and cheating together rose from 21.5% to 42.1% of recorded cases. Only 8–15 convictions a year (0.9–1.6% of registered cases) were recorded under the stalking head in 2019–2021. NCRB cases equalled 11.7% of NCRP incidents in 2021 and 5.4% in 2023; in 2024 only 2.43% of 20,33,316 portal complaints became FIRs. In Haryana, complaints rose from 1,362 (2019) to 66,784 (2022) and about 1.15 lakh (2023), while NCRB cases rose from 564 to 751, so the ratio of cases to complaints fell from 41.4% to 1.0% and 0.7%. Haryana's 2023 rate of 2.6 cases per lakh was far below that of Telangana (52.1) and Karnataka (35.9), and only 103 women-centric cyber crimes were registered against 15,758 crimes against women.

Conclusion: Official statistics record the visible tip of cyberstalking. Registration capacity, not incidence, appears to be the binding constraint, and it is weakest where complaint volumes grow fastest. Separate counting of cyberstalking, reporting of outcomes and investment in registration and forensic capacity are needed.