I was talking about stories involving rape that made it into international media and that I read about. Uttar Pradesh features frequently in those.

Anecdotal stories and statistics are 2 different things, but it’s possible to infer some things from them. One important thing about statistics is that you should never accept them at face value (the same with anecdotal stories obviously), they are collected by humans after all.

Your wiki page is about crime, but there’s also one about rape: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_India

That page has statistics about “registered” rape cases. In the registered rape cases Uttar Pradesh ranks fairly low, which does not correlate with the amount of scandals that make it into international media. And since loads of those scandals seem to involve police, it’s not a stretch to conclude that the number of registered cases is a vast underestimation of the real amount.

Reasons why it’s likely lower: police refuse to register cases against specific persons or cases from specific people (Dalits), but far more will not be registered simply because the victims don’t even try. There’s the shame of it being known that you were raped, but there’s also justified fear of retaliations afterwards, if the police wasn’t directly involved in the rape in the first place.

The mismatch between the high amount of anecdotal stories and the low statistics also tells us that there’s no improvement to be expected in the next few years. The first step to recovery, is accepting that you have a problem, and Uttar Pradesh is clearly not there yet.