Even as the Australian Deputy PM reassures that Indian students are safe in Australia, statistics narrate a different story.

According to some figures released by the Australian police, robberies and assaults on Indians have increased by a third in the last one year.

• 1447 assaults and robberies were committed on victims of Indian origin, up from 1083 the previous year.

But the number of indian students almost doubled in that same time, so perhaps those figures need to be seen in that perspective.

As Australia starts investigating the spate of racial attacks on Indians, its deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has told NDTV that the government is doing all it can to ensure the safety of Indian students. Gillard said Indian students are welcome and they want to ensure their safety at all costs.

PTI adds: Victorian police chief Simon Overland on Wednesday cautioned against attaching racial overtones to all attacks on Indian students in Australia, saying there was a "hysterical edge" to such reactions.

Denying that the latest attack on a 21-year old Indian student here on Tuesday was racially-motivated, Overland also defended the conduct of police in preventing such incidents.

In the ninth such attack on Indians in the last one month, Nardeep Singh, a nursing student at Chisholm Institute in Dandenong in Melbourne's east, was slashed with box-cutter knife by one of the five men who confronted him in a car park on Tuesday.

Singh was attacked by five men when he was leaving his college in an apparent robbery attempt, police said.  

Police chief commissioner in Victoria, Overland said the latest attack did not appear to be race-related and denied allegations that police was not doing enough to tackle race-based attacks.

"There is a hysterical edge to this, and assertions that we have not done enough on this issue and not taking it seriously is just plain wrong. We have done an enormous amount on this issue on the past 18 months both pro-actively and reactively," he was quoted by a media report.