A year on the road, state by state
Kenna (@kenna.kala), a trans woman from New York, didn't just pass through India on a two-week holiday. She stayed for the better part of a year, moving between states, living with the rhythms of each place. When she put together a ranked video on Instagram about how safe she felt as a woman across different Indian states, it went viral — and for good reason. Her rankings are not a sweeping verdict on India, but a granular, honest account of how one traveller felt on the ground.
"I just want to highlight that there are incredible safe places as well as unsafe places, just like in any other country," she wrote. "I definitely feel safer in many parts of India than I do in my own country, but there are also places where I feel significantly less safe."
Her point is simple and worth repeating: India is not one monolith. Where you go matters enormously.
The rankings, and what she actually experienced
At the very bottom of her list sits Uttar Pradesh, which she scored zero out of ten. She described being groped at a temple in Prayagraj — a deeply distressing experience in a place that should feel like sanctuary. New Delhi came next at 1 out of 10, with Kenna offering a pointed, rhetorical "Do I have to explain?" — a nod to the capital's well-documented reputation around women's safety.
Rajasthan scored a 5. She loves it there, she says, but is clear-eyed: "It's definitely NOT safe." West Bengal and Goa both landed at 6, each with their own caveats — she wouldn't walk alone at night in Kolkata, and in Goa, she found the police themselves to be a source of unease rather than reassurance.
Tamil Nadu scored 7, despite a jarring incident in Pondicherry where a stranger walked up and showed her explicit content on his phone. "I still think it's safe if you're modest," she noted — a comment that speaks to the exhausting calculus many women travellers make daily. Karnataka came in at 8, and she spoke of it warmly: "I love it here so much."
At the top of the list, without hesitation: Kerala. "Probably the safest state in India," she wrote. Kerala's numbers back up the sentiment — the state recorded 821,999 foreign tourist visits in 2025 alone, an increase of over 11% from the previous year, with travellers arriving from the UK, the US, Germany, France and beyond.
Why this matters for a solo travel audience in India
Kenna's video is valuable precisely because it refuses to be either a tourism brochure or a scare story. For Indian women planning solo trips — and for international travellers considering India — the nuance she offers is far more useful than a blanket safety rating.
A few things her experience quietly underscores: harassment at religious sites is real and documented, and busy tourist towns are not automatically safer than quieter ones. The presence of police does not always translate to a feeling of safety, as her Goa observation shows. And southern states, particularly Kerala and Karnataka, consistently come up in conversations about more respectful, navigable environments for women travelling alone.
This is one person's experience, shaped by her identity, her choices, and the specific moments she encountered. It is not a definitive map. But it is an honest one — and in the absence of enough candid, public accounts from women who have actually done this, it fills a gap that matters.