Reported cases of denial of access to public spaces to persons from Scheduled Caste communities — a crime category that was introduced in 2017 by the National Crime Records Bureau — have been rising across India since law enforcement authorities started recording them, with an increasing share of these crimes consistently being reported in Uttar Pradesh.
From the latest available set of crime data in the NCRB’s 2023 Crime in India report, there were 180 reported cases of SCs being denied access to public spaces under the Prevention of Atrocities (SC/ST) Act across the country. Of these, 173 cases were reported in U.P. alone, with the other cases that year coming from Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan.
NCRB’s data for the year before, 2022, showed that the country reported 305 cases of SCs being denied access to public spaces, of which 300, or 98.36%, were from U.P. In a report released earlier this year, the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) had said that an increase in such cases “reflected entrenched caste-based segregation”.
The State is scheduled to vote in its next Assembly election in 2027, and the last few months have seen groups of forward caste communities in the State express their disappointment with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in the State and the Union government over several issues, including the controversy over the University Grants Commission’s equity rules for which the protests were particularly visible in U.P.
