The crime rate hits an all-time high even as the Capital grapples with a litany of civic woes
USTAD Amjad Ali Khan, one of Delhi's best known citizens, is in a state of despair. "The national capital," the sarod maestro laments, "is no longer an ideal place for anyone to live in." Indeed. Dehumanisation, disease and decay-not life and vitality-seem to have become the 'cultural' leitmotif of what is among the world's oldest living cities. There is little music left in the city's foul, carbon monoxide-laced air today. On its streets, lawlessness reigns.
Surviving a city where life gets cheaper while e everything else becomes dearer is an ordeal for everybody, not the ustad along. A huge majority of Delhi's 1.3 crore denizens would readily agree with his anguished assessment of the current state of affairs in the city he calls home. An unending litany of civic woes has become their lot of late: unsafe roads, traffic snarl-ups, increasing pressure on land and resources, prolonged power cuts, severe water scarcity, dangerous levels of pollutions, sprawling slum clusters, filth and squalor all around. And now, they find themselves in the grip of a crime wave which only seems to get worse with each passing day. Delhi is today India's crime capital and, according to Union Home Ministry figures, it is five times more unsafe than the badlands of Bihar.
Indeed, Delhi is today a city under siege. The police, buffeted by a dramatic spurt in criminal activity, have declared a state of red alert. A division bench of the Delhi high court, in a stern notice to the city government and the police commissioner in response to a public interest petition field by a lawyer, has sought a status report on "what action is being taken in view of the state of lawlessness which seems to have affected the National Capital Territory". Union home minister L.K. Advani has admitted in Parliament that the number of heinous crimes has increased in the three months since April: the figure during the corresponding period last year was 645, this year it is 727.
According to 'unofficial' Delhi Police statistics, the situation could actually be much more alarming: in May this year, the incidence of crime was 100 per cent more than it was during the same month in 1997, in June it was 73 percent more and in July 53 per cent more. While 21 robberies were reported between June 15 and 30 this year, the number shot up to 41 in the next 15 days- between July 1 and 15- an increase of nearly 100 per cent.
The people of Delhi are understandably teetering on the edge of panic. Rape, murder and daylight heists have become daily occurrences as criminals strike at will. And Delhi's police commissioner V.N. Singh admits on camera that the shortage of personnel and low morale are the undoing of a hopelessly overstretched force. The Delhi Police has 54,000 personnel, 6,000 of whom are permanently deployed for VIP security. To make matters worse, a fair percentage of the force is made up of outsiders who are not particularly familiar with Delhi's topography. Not a happy situation at all.
"What is urgently needed," feels former Delhi police chief Ved Marwah, "is all-out fire-fighting measures. Criminal gangs should be identified, crushed." That, unfortunately, isn't happening. As a result, criminals appear to be having a free run of the sprawling city. They have been striking repeatedly in crowded areas and in broad daylight. July has been an especially bad month for Delhi's citizens and its police force.
Those who thought there was safety in numbers were rudely disavowed of that notion when a gang of criminals, armed with knives, boarded a Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) but bound for the Inter State Bus Terminus from east Delhi's Anand Vihar and looted Rs. 60,000 from passengers earlier this month even as the police top brass were out on patrol in the area. Days later, in Narela, north Delhi, a major's wife who owns a petrol pump was robbed of Rs 2.87 lakh by four Maruti-borne men. In another similar incident, a 52-year-old businessman, caught in a traffic jam in Vivek Vihar, east Delhi, was shot at by four youths disgorged by a Maruti and robbed of Rs 1.2 lakh. On July 23, dacoits struck in broad daylight in a congested south Delhi locality, Zakir Nagar, and looted over Rs 9 lakh and 3 kg of gold from a property dealer's apartment.
Housing: Official Estimate
Population in urban areas in 2001: 82.52lakh
Population growth: 5 per cent annually
Area for new dwellings: 24,000 hectares
Housing units at present: 11.36 lakh
Shortfall: 4.83 lakh dwelling units
Jhuggi cluster dwellers: 40 lakh people
A variety of reasons are being cited for the sudden spurt in Delhi's crime rate. According to Karnal Singh, deputy commissioner of police (crime), robberies have increased since prohibition was lifted in Haryana. Criminal elements involved in bootlegging in the state are at a loose end today and have, hence, turned their attention to Delhi. "The Delhi Police," he says, "has launched a special drive, but we need some time for our efforts to yield results." Localities like Neeti Bagh, Greater Kailash, Gulmohar Park and Maharani Bagh, where the affluent live, and areas flanking the Ring Road, which facilitates easy getaways for criminals, have been the worst hit by the recent spate of 'highway' robberies.
Sewage and Garbage Disposal: Down in the Dumps
Not without reason has the Delhi high court's division bench, comprising acting Chief Justice Mahinder Narain and Justice S.K. Mahajan, commented: " One can imagine an incident occurring in an isolated place. But can you imagine a situation where buses are being looted in broad daylight in a city?" The police defence has been rather unconvincing. Senior police officers say that the force has been caught unawares primarily because most of the recent crimes have been committed by novices and gangs from Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, making it difficult for the police to nab them. Moreover, they deny outright that there is a crime wave, that there is reason to panic. What has happened, they claim, is that the police has only become more efficient: more criminal cases have been registered in the last few months.
Not everybody is willing to buy that line, of course. Says Marwah: " The Delhi Police has to report to several authorities-the Union Home Ministry, the lt governor, the chief minister and the police commissioner. It is a system that breeds a lack of accountability." When something goes wrong, he explains, "everybody blames everybody else". What is it exactly that's gone wrong? Says Asghar Wajahat, litterateur, TV scriptwriter and head of Jamia Millia Islamia's Hindi department: "People living in and around Delhi are, historically, an aggressive lot. You have to use force to control them. As state power declines and these people get a share of that power, lawlessness is bound to result."
Speaking on Delhi's deteriorating law and order situation in the Rajya Sabha last week, Advani attributed that increase in crime, especially against women, to the breakdown of traditional social systems and institutions like the joint family and village society. Orthodox social traditions, the home minister said, have given way to western values and increased exposure to violence and sex through films. Says Wajahat, who has lived in Delhi since 1971: "The fear of punishment is a thing of the past. For people in authority are no longer interested in governance. All they care for is political power which is the key to the accumulation of wealth."
On a simpler plane, tow principal trends have been witnessed in the national Capital Region's crime scene. One, the real estate recession in Mumbai has forced many UP criminals active in the western metropolis to return to their own state. Some of these elements may be behind the robberies and dacoities in Delhi. With the government deciding to open up construction activity to private participation in the capital, a boom is expected in the sector within a year or two and that is why the Mumbai mafia is believed to be eyeing Delhi with evil intent. And with arms and ammunition easily available, the switchover is bound to be quite smooth.
Two, the petty criminals of yore-the chain-snatcher, the pickpocket, the drug addict-mugger-have turned more ambitious, more aggressive. They are no longer content with filching a few hundred rupees from an unsuspecting victim's pocket. They have turned to a more daring, more lucrative crime: armed hold-ups.
Water Supply: High and Dry
Requirement: 3,200 million gallons per day
Supply: 2,700 million gallons per day
Shortfall: 500 million gallons per day
Estimated requirement by 2001: 4,030 million gallonsper day
Pollution: Deadly Fumes
Total air pollution load: 3,000 tonnes per day
The rate of respiratory diseases is 12 times more than the national average. Nearly 12 per cent of Delhi's school children suffer from asthma.
Delhiites have the world's highest DDT levels in their bodies.
The soaring crime graph is only one of the many woes that the average Delhiite has to grapple with every day. Trapped in an urban nightmare in which nothing ever seems to go right, he has to make do with woefully inadequate municipal services, the strain on which increases with every new wave of migration that takes place. Owing to the pressure of population, which is growing by 5 per cent annually with four to five lakh people migrating to the overcrowded Capital each year, all the lofty targets that the Delhi Master Plan – 2001 set for the city remain on paper. "When I arrived in Delhi 25 years ago," says Oriya poet J.P. Das, "the city's telephone directory had only one volume. Today, it has three. I tell my friends I'll leave the city the day the directory goes into a fourth volume."
One of the key aims of the Master Plan 2001 was the establishment of an efficient, cost-effective transportation system. The plan came into effect in 1990, but Delhi is yet to get a transport infrastructure that fulfils the needs of the city's commuters. Several grand plans have been made in the past few year, but none has yielded an answer to Delhi's perennial transport problem. With nearly 4,000 Blue-line buses now off the roads and the DTC's ageing fleet unable to cope with the pressure, one has to be truly brave or absolutely helpless to commute by public transport in the city. Result: everybody who can afford it goes in for a car.
While it does indeed solve one problem at the individual level, it creates several others at the macro level. With the number of vehicles expected to increase dramatically-from 30 lakh in 1997 to 60 lakh in 2001- air pollution, which, according to World Bank estimates, claims 7,500 lives a year in the Capital, is only going to get worse. Vehicular pollution accounts for 70 per cent of the Delhi's air pollution load-3,000 mt each day. Not surprising really, considering the city has more automobiles than those in Chennai, Mumbai, Calcutta put together.
The impact is scary: the rate of respiratory diseases is 12 times more than the national average, nearly 12 per cent of the city's schoolchildren suffer from asthma and Delhiites have the highest levels of DDT in their bodies in the world. Says documentary filmmaker Sehjo Singh: "I'll definitely be out of Delhi in two years. I'll put my son in Rishi Valley School and set up base in Bangalore. I cannot let my children breathe Delhi's foul air anymore."
Some have shifted out already. Self-contained residential complexes in Gurgaon and Faridabad, complete with their own security arrangements, captive power generators and giant reservoirs, are the favoured destinations. "The quality of life in Gurgaon is much better," says television personality Ramesh Sharma, who has been a resident of Garden Estate for seven years. "But for how long? The entire Delhi culture is shifting to Gurgaon." Other Delhiites fleeing the city's pollution have beaded out to the hills of UP and Himachal Pradesh.
BE that as it may, Delhi has failed to deflect the migration of people from other states who come seeking greener pastures only to rob the Capital of a little stretch of its greenery. The growing pressure on land has seen indiscriminate encroachment on protected areas around monuments of national importance and the rapid spread of unauthorized colonies and jhuggi clusters. "We have 166 Delhi monuments under us," says A.K. Sinha, officer on special duty (monuments), Archaeological Survey of India. "But our budgetary constraints do not allow us to concentrate on more than 30 to 40 of these structure." What Delhiites lack, says Sinha, is pride in their heritage and the will to protect their history. "In a city like Delhi, where space is at such a premium, once encroachment happens, it becomes very difficult to remove the squatters."
If the situation in Tughlakabad Fort, Jantar mantar and Hauz Khas is worrying, the hundreds of other Delhi monuments that are unclassified and are misused with impunity are much worse off. INTACH is trying to do its bit for these crumbling structures. "We have drawn up a list of all these heritage sites and stressed the need to protect them," says O.P. Jain, convenor of INTACH'S Delhi chapter. "We will undertake maintenance of these monuments with financial assistance of the Delhi government.
Unfortunately, the government seems to have abdicated its responsibility in many other crucial areas. It is a saga of wanton profligacy. While large residential tracts of the Capital are subjected to prolonged power cuts on the best of days owing to a daily shortfall of 600 MW, the Delhi Vidyut Board (DVB) allows 40 per cent the power it distributes to be filched by a section of the population that does not pay a paise for it. DVB loses Rs 600 crore in revenue every year as a result. Incurring heavy losses is a way of life for Delhi government agencies. DTC loses Rs 1 crore a day and the city government has to fork out Rs 12 crore a month.
Water supply, too, is inadequate. And what is supplied is generally a cocktail of life-threatening poisons. A recent study by All India Institute of Medical Sciences found water supplied to south Delhi infested with pathogenic bacteria. Delhi's groundwater, which accounts for 12 per cent of the total water supply, is contaminated with pesticides, flourished and other toxic chemicals.
Monuments: Crumbling edifices
Total number of monuments: 1,300
Monuments of historical importance under ASI: 166
ASI's annual budget for monument protection: Lessthan Rs 1 crore monuments encroached upon: 30-40, mainly in Hauz Khas,Tughlakabad and Green Park.
As for facilities to treat the mountain of waste that Delhi generates every day, the national capital is a disaster zone. The city dumps 1,900 mld (million litres per day) of municipal waste and 320 mld of industrial waste into the Yamuna, while the installed capacity for treatment is 1,270 mld. Of the 18 landfills that are used to dispose of the 5,000 mt of solid waste that is generated each day, 14 have already been exhausted. The remaining four will be filled up in two to three years. What next? As with everything else in the city, the government is as much in the dark as the general public.