Beef up the police

The Supreme Court has allowed the prosecution of NASSCOM President Som Mittal for not providing adequate security to a woman employee, who was raped and murdered by a cab driver, while being driven home from work after night shift. The crime took place in December 2005, when Mittal was Managing Director of HP GlobalSoft, and was committed by the driver of a cab hired by the company to ferry employees to and from their residences.

The issue will now be argued before the relevant Trial Court and the law will take its course. But the tragic murder of a young woman and the subsequent prosecution of the head of the company that employed her throw up several broader questions that have nothing to do with the case.

The first, obviously, relates to the declining quality of policing, not just in Bangalore where the incident took place, but across the country. Everyone knows that the police force in India is indifferent to the needs of the common man and is also corrupt, venal and inefficient.

But the point of writing this editorial is not to point out the obvious. Rather, it is to draw attention to the fact that current methods of policing, and the deployment of the force, seem totally unprepared for a 21st century economy that forces massive numbers of relatively young men and women to step out of their homes late at night and return even later. India is now a 24x7 economy, but our police and other infrastructure have not yet adapted to this change. The need of the hour, obviously, is to have more, and more effective, night patrolling across all cities. Ask any night shift worker in any Indian city about this and the answer will be the same: at night, they depend, for their safety, almost totally on fate and the goodwill of the drivers who ferry them, often over long distances.

Then, urban infrastructure has not kept pace with the growing job opportunities in the BPO sector and the consequent influx of many more people into the handful of cities that have emerged as magnets for the sector. This has created opportunities—in the form of demand for domestic helps and providers of support services like laundry, deliveries, etc.—for unorganised sector workers. It is nobody’s case that these people be denied the opportunity to earn a living, but obviously, such a huge influx of people into already densely packed and overcrowded cities can lead to tensions and crime. The answer: better policing. Business Today, thus, urges the government to tackle this on a war-footing. Serial repeats of the incident referred to above, besides being a slur on our society, can also drive investors away.