Sitting amid the blackened remains of his home, 32-year-old Nikesh Gawali carefully broke open a half-melted plastic box with a screwdriver. His hands shook slightly, not out of fear, but out of hope. “I’m trying to find my daughter Aarti’s gold earrings,” he said quietly, still focused on the box. “She’s just five. I got them made recently after months of labour work.” The plastic box, warped and blackened by heat, was one of the few things left from his two-room house on the outskirts of Dhamangaon village . All around him lay ash, broken tin sheets and charred wooden beams. The walls had cracked under the heat and the front room’s tin roof had caved in completely. What remained was a blackened debris all around - almost nothing to suggest a home once stood there. Nikesh earns his living as an agricultural labourer, like many in the village. Work is uncertain and depends on the season. Those earrings weren’t just jewellery - they were a small dream, a reward for his hard work,...
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| Nagpur CP Amitesh Kumar |
Seventeen robberies within a span of nine days shows an alarming rise in street crime which has shaken the city police. With the onset of monsoon, the crime graph in the city normally tends to nose dive. All of sudden the robbers are on a looting spree indicating the loosening grip of the law and enforcement agency.
According to statistics of Nagpur police, a whooping 17 robberies were reported between August 1 to 9. In July and June, the city police registered 13 and 4 robbery cases respectively. In these 19 robbery cases, the victims were pedestrians or travelling on the two-wheelers and targeted by the robbers on the busy streets.
Despite round the clock surveillance of 3,200 CCTV cameras, the robbers could still escape to their destination. Bajaj Nagar, Gittikhadan, Hudkeshwar, Sitabuldi, Nandanvan and Pardi are the most affected police stations from where this daring loots were reported. Not only the streets have become unsafe, the robbers are striking at their will as citizens are not safe even inside their shops. In one of the cases, the robbers snatched the gold chain of a medical shopkeeper when he was present in the shop in the Nandanvan area.
It may be mentioned here that the highest robbery cases were registered in the city in March this year when 23 persons were robbed in separate incidents. Later the cases started to decline but many of these robbery cases were not solved by the police. If the spurt in robbery cases in August continues with current speed, the city will witness around 50 robberies in a single month,” said a senior police official.
Another official argued that the current trend would start to decline if the police manage to arrest the culprits. He also claimed that there are two to three gangs behind the street robberies. Perhaps the old defaulters who were in jail have come out and are back in business. In such circumstances, the cops just have to glance through the records and hound out the criminals and push them back to jail to control the street crimes.
People close to city police claim that the field units are under pressure to showcase breakthroughs and every team is busy in detection of thefts -- house-breaking thefts and vehicle thefts. Recent success of the city police in detection of thefts was quite admirable but in the process the focus shifted from street policing to photo opp and this might have resulted in spurt in robberies, felt a retired police official.
Nagpur witnesses 9 murders in July
After registering 11 murders in March this year, the city witnessed whopping nine murders in July. Most of the cases are related to family disputes, claimed a police official. In June, the city witnessed five murders and six attempt to murder cases. A total of three murders have been reported till August 9.
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