Our not-so-friendly neighbour Pakistan is now left embarrassed after New Zealand cricket team left it high and dry hours before the first ODI they were to play citing security concerns. While rest of the world wasn’t quite surprised that Pakistan continues to exude fear for harbouring terrorists and nurturing Islamist group like Taliban for years, Pakistanis were stunned that someone would fear for their lives in the country.
Pakistani cricketers and politicians took to social media to vent out their frustration and even smelled ‘India’s conspiracy‘ because a third country found Pakistan unsafe for its citizens. Soon, some social media ‘influencers’ were sharing reports on how Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan is the second safest city in South Asia.
Obviously, the claim triggered hilarious reactions considering Pakistan as a country is not really best known for safety.
But how true are these claims anyway? We at OpIndia got curious on the study and thought process and methodology that might have gone into making such claims.
A simple google search on “Islamabad second safest city” threw us a number of search results of Pakistani news websites reporting the same.
In first week of September, Pakistani media had widely reported that Islamabad is the second safest city in whole of South Asia. What triggered this gem of a news was a tweet posted by an unverified account of Office of Deputy Commissioner of Islamabad.
This tweet was posted on 1st September, 2021, which also triggered hilarious reactions mostly from Pakistani citizens who laughed at the very idea that someone would call the city ‘safe’.
Pakistanis pointed out that there are increasing cases of bike thefts and other various crimes in the city which is being pegged as ‘second safest’.
Curiouser, we looked at the study which made such claim. Pakistani media stated that the data was compiled by one ‘international organisation’ called Numbeo. Numbeo claims to be largest ‘database’ of ‘user contributed data’ about cities and countries. Apparently it had ‘released’ the ‘safety index’ for 2021.
As per the website, Kabul, Afghanistan, which recently fell to Islamist group Taliban, ranks 34 in the list of safest cities in South Asia. So, how does ‘Numbeo’ calculate the data? Well, whoever visits their website (Numbeo) gets to take a survey and on basis of the answers given by these ‘visitors’, Numbeo zeroes in on ‘safe cities’. More people chose Islamabad after Mangaluru (Mangalore) on that ‘survey’ which made that city come second in list of ‘safe cities’.
Now how many would be visiting the obscure site and taking the survey, no one knows. But Pakistan officials thought it is good enough to give itself pat on its back. It seems Pakistanis knew what would hit them pretty soon and Pakistani media already tried to build up a ‘mahaul’, so to say that the country and its capital are ‘safe’ but New Zealand didn’t quite listen to them.
