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With the greatest possible respect, how would you know how low the rate of petty crime in India is?
If crime is as low as western Europe, or 1st-world Asia, or America outside a few black ghettos, then "nobody in my social circle is a recent victim of crime" doesn't imply a large enough sample size. Police-recorded crime statistics are notoriously bogus everywhere, and Indian ones are going to be more so than most. And you yourself are pointing out (correctly) that media coverage of crime is mostly sensationalist lies.
There is, for good reasons, a standing State Department advisory warning US travellers about pickpockets in London. The risk of being pickpocketed if you do not look or act like a tourist is indistinguishable from zero. I assume the same is true of India, although the wording of the respective warnings implies that State considers the problem to be worse in India than it is here. I do not think the informal enforcement you praise protects tourists, and the absence of pickpocketing against non-tourists proves its effectiveness in the same way that the lack of yeti sightings proves the effectiveness of yeti repellent.
You've just made it clear that even if I were to produce any figures, you wouldn't believe them. Which isn't even the wrong approach, since crime stats from the Third World are notoriously unreliable, and this isn't as cut and dry as murder.
That being said, the gold standard for comparative statistics when comparing crime rates between jurisdictions is the murder rate. Because, well, murder is a pretty big deal, hard to hide, and the cops, even if lazy and incompetent, are usually not that awful.
India, according to UNODC figures, had a murder rate of 2.94/100,000 in 2021.
The global average is 5.19 in 2023.
The World Bank claims 11 for "low income countries". 10.9 for all of Africa.
The United States? 5.9
I'm not bold enough to immediately jump to claims that the same ratio holds for other forms of crime, but yes, you are far less likely to be murdered as the average person in India compared to the global or third world average. We even beat the States, which is unusually awful by Western standards.
I have no objections if you wish to consider my claims to be entirely anecdotal. I stand by them regardless.
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