Kolkata was revealed to be the safest metropolitan city in India yet again, with a crime rate of 129.5 reported crimes per 1 lakh people, according to the latest report by the National Crime Records Bureau.
NCRB, in its latest report, compiled a list of the number of reported crimes under Indian Penal Code and Special and Local Laws, for 19 metropolitan cities with a population of more than 2 million.
This marks the third consecutive year that Kolkata recorded the lowest crime rate in the country among these metropolitan cities. Hyderabad, which had trailed Kolkata closely as the second safest city in the past two years, had yet again recorded the second least crime rate in 2020, at 233 reported crimes per 1 lakh people.
Mumbai showed a slight drop in crime rate to end up as the third safest metropolitan city in 2020, with 318.5 crimes per 1 lakh people.
On the other end of the spectrum, Chennai turned out to be the city with the highest crime rate in 2020 with 1936.2 crimes per 1 lakh people.
Delhi, which recorded the highest crime rate in 2019, saw a drop of 16 per cent in 2020 with 1609 reported crimes per 1 lakh people, and came in second after Chennai as the city with the highest crime rate.
Surat and Ahmedabad followed closely as the third and fourth lest safest cities, with 1301 and 1300 crimes per 1 lakh people, respectively.
Changes In Crime Rate Since 2018
One of the starkest changes in crime rate was seen in Kochi - which had recorded the highest crime rate in 2018 with 2578.6 crimes per lakh people. After dropping 33 per cent in 2019, the crime rate in Kochi dropped another 49 per cent in 2020, and reached at 863.9 reported crimes per 1 lakh people.
In contrast, Chennai saw a whopping 134 per cent rise in crime rate in 2020, which pushed it to the city with the highest recorded crime rate that year.
Delhi and Jaipur showed significant drops in crime rate (15 per cent and 40 per cent drop, respectively) last year.
Meanwhile, Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Kozhikode and Pune saw a sharp rise in crime rate in 2020, rising 54 per cent, 51 per cent, 58 per cent, and 121 per cent, respectively.
Pune's sharp rise in crime rate led the Maharashtrian city to drop from the 3rd place among the list of safest cities in 2019, to the 7th place last year.