Increased political killings have marred the state's reputation of late.
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Is God's own Country, the country's crime capital? So says the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) about Kerala, the country's showpiece for human development.
According to NCRB's latest annual report for 2011, Kerala ranked first in criminal activity among Indian states and union territories while the state's commercial capital Kochi held the same dubious record among Indian cities.
This has provoked angry outbursts from the Kerala government, opposition and also its police department which have questioned the methodology of NCRB's rankings.
"Crimes are seen to be high in Kerala only because it is the most enlightened state where every crime is recorded" said Chief Minister Oommen Chandy. "Not Kochi but Delhi is the country's most criminal city" claims Jacob Punnuse, Director General of Police and calls for a revamping of NCRB's ranking methodology to rank criminality.
Shashi Tharoor, MP from Thiruvananthapuram tweeted ; "Kerala keeps accurate statistics. The badlands don't".
While Kerala was ranked first in criminality, "badlands" like Bihar or UP were ranked at 24 th and 30th respectively.
Evidently what earned Kerala the dubious distinction was that criminality was calculated on the basis of Rate of Crimes (RoC) ie; number of crimes registered per one lakh population.
Kerala's Rate of Cognizable Crime (RCC) is 515.6 per lakh of population as against an all India average of 192.2. RCC in UP was merely 97.8 and of Bihar, 130.9.
No wonder Kerala, with a lower population than the "badlands", has topped in criminality although it was ranked 6th in the Incidence of Total Cognizable Crimes (TCC).
Kerala's population is 3.34 crores compared