“Walk through College Street at midnight. The safest big city in India is not a statistic — it's a feeling.”
Kolkata Crime Rate & Safety Statistics
National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) statistics for Kolkata, 2022-2024
Kolkata recorded 11,864 IPC and BNS crimes in 2024 — a rate of 84.1 per lakh, the lowest of any major Indian metro and less than half the next-lowest. Chennai sits at 181.3, Mumbai 279.3, Bengaluru 408.5. Delhi records 1,688.0, twenty times Kolkata's rate.
The city is not, however, getting safer on every measure. Recorded crime rose from 10,943 in 2023, murders went from 43 to 57, and extortion more than tripled to 185. Cruelty by a husband or his relatives remains the single largest crime-against-women head at 869 cases, barely moved in three years.
About this data
What this page shows
Fifteen crime heads for 2022, 2023 and 2024, a comparison of seven metropolitan cities on NCRB's published crime rate, the four main crimes-against-women categories, and Special & Local Laws and cyber crime totals. Kolkata's chargesheeting rate for 2024 is 95.4%, among the highest of any metro.
Where the data comes from
National Crime Records Bureau, Crime in India, 2022, 2023 and 2024 editions — metropolitan-city tables 1B.1 (totals), 1B.4 (crime head-wise) and 9B.1 (cyber crime), taking the Kolkata row from each. NCRB publishes only as PDF with no machine-readable feed, so these figures are transcribed from the published reports.
Two breaks in the series
The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita replaced the Indian Penal Code on 1 July 2024, so the 2024 column counts cases under both codes — 6,138 IPC and 5,726 BNS. More importantly, the 2024 edition reports “Offences against Women and Child” as its own top-level category, where 2022 and 2023 counted them inside “Offences affecting the Human Body”. That category appears to collapse from 3,820 to 1,664 as a result; it is a reclassification, not a fall in crime. Assault on Women (Modesty) is likewise recorded under differently worded BNS sections from 2024, so its drop from 241 to 79 cannot be read as a real decline.
Limitations worth knowing
NCRB calculates metropolitan-city crime rates on actual Census 2011population — 14.11 million for Kolkata — not current estimates. These rates are therefore not comparable with state-level rates or with present-day per-capita figures, and the comparison above is valid only because every city is measured the same way. Recorded crime also measures reporting as much as incidence: a low rate can reflect genuine safety, reluctance to report, or how a police force registers complaints, and this data cannot separate those. The crime heads shown are a documented subset of NCRB's full schedule, so they sum to less than the city total and should not be added up to derive it.
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