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A Village Burnt Overnight: Tears, Loss and Survival in Dhamangaon Blaze

  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,...

Violent crime: Nagpur ranks fourth in country

Nagpur CP Amitesh Kumar

The Nagpur city ranked sixth in crime rate among the 19 metropolitan cities of India and first in the State last year, revealed by the Crime in India 2021 report published by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).As per the NCRB, the police stations in Nagpur Police Commissionerate registered 13,312 cases under different Sections of Indian Penal Code (IPC), at the rate of 532.9 per lakh population of Nagpur in 2021. Amitesh Kumar was the Commissioner of Police of Nagpur in 2021. While Mumbai city recorded 63,689 IPC crimes with crime rate of 345.9, Pune recorded 9,511 IPC crimes with crime rate of 188.3.
The statistics is a commentary on the law and order situation in the city, where frustration among the populace about lack of adequate opportunities seems to play a major role in youth taking to crime to further their dreams. The crime rate describes the number of crimes reported to law enforcement agencies per lakh population.
A crime rate is calculated by dividing the number of reported crimes by the total population; the result is multiplied by one lakh. The NCRB considered the population of the 19 metropolitan cities as per the 2011 Census data. According to the report, the population of Nagpur in 2011 was 25 lakh.
Most shocking fact is - After Delhi (71.4) and Patna (73.2), Indore (59.6), Nagpur is ranked fourth in the country based on the rate of violent crime reported by NCRB and again tops the list in Maharashtra. The rate of violent crime in Pune was 37.6 while 26.8 was recorded in Mumbai in the same period.
The violent crime cases are showing an upward trend in Nagpur. In 2021, the City police registered 1,409 violent crime cases while the city saw 1,228 and 1,361 cases in 2020 and 2019 respectively. The violent crime cases includes severe body offences -- Murder, Attempt to murder, Dowry deaths, Foeticide, Infanticide, Culpable homicide not amounting to murder, grievous hurts,
In 2021, Nagpur reported a whopping 95 murders and 119 attempt to murders, followed by six cases of culpable homicide not amounting to murder and three cases of grievous hurt.
The number of murder cases in Nagpur is lesser than Pune, which has recorded 100 murders, and Mumbai with 162. But murder rate of Nagpur (3.8) is much greater than Mumbai (0.9) and Pune (2.0) as population base of latter two cities is much bigger compared to city.

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