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Today's Paper | May 01, 2024

Published 13 Oct, 2017 09:53pm

Economist's report marks Karachi as most unsafe city in world

Karachi has been named among the least safe cities of the world in a report published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) — the research and analysis division of The Economist Group.

The report is based on the second iteration of the index, which ranks 60 cities across 49 indicators covering digital security, health security, infrastructure security and personal security.

Asia and the Middle East and Africa dominate the bottom of the index as Dhaka, Yangon and Karachi are at the bottom of the list.

Of the ten cities at the bottom of the overall index, three are in South-east Asia; Manila, Ho Chi Minh City and Jakarta, two are in South Asia; Dhaka and Karachi while two are in the Middle East and Africa; Cairo and Tehran.

Karachi was ranked 60, with 38.77 points, among all the 60 cities mentioned in the report. Karachi was added in the list in 2017.

"Although it performs poorly across all of the categories, it was dragged down by a very low level of personal security. This is a reflection of a number of factors, but the main reason is that among the cities in the index, it experiences by far the most frequent and most severe terrorist attacks," reads the report.

Karachi ranked 43.22 points and stood at 54th in terms of digital security. Marked as a low-income city, Karachi is placed on the last slot [60th] with 39.92 points when it comes to health security.

As far as infrastructure security is concerned, the megalopolis was placed at 59th spot with only 40.11 points above Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Furthermore, lower-income cities—Mumbai, Delhi, Manila, Yangon, Karachi and Dhaka — all feature in the bottom 10 in this category.

Only five cities across the globe were placed above Karachi in the category of deaths from natural disasters. Annually, more than four people among one million lost their life in Karachi due to natural disasters.

More than 500 people were either killed or wounded every year in Karachi due to terrorist attacks. The average might be less than the estimates and they were based on global terrorism database's figure during 2007 to 2016.The city was ranked the last in the category of personal security.

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