Car and two-wheeler thefts have become an easy affair

20 July, 2012

If you take a look around, you will find our roads jam-packed with four-wheelers, big cars, luxurious cars, small cars and innumerable two wheelers surrounding them like leaves and branches adorning a tree.

TO ADD horror to the insufferable situation, you find the Monsters on Eight Wheels-the Roadways buses and the private passenger carriers - standing like the Great Wall of China to immobilize you completely. The little space left is taken away by tankers, trolleys and rickshaws. A man on foot has to squeeze himself through the Mahakumbh of Vehicles. I remember lines of an old song: "Itne barhe maley mein paon mein kisi ke koi pis jae tumhe kya, Dekha karo Bhagwan garibon ka tamasha."

Today, it is not human mela but car mela. In olden days we did not see as many pedestrians or cyclists on our roads as the number of vehicles we see today, moving forward at a snails pace. There is no parking space for them. A bigger problem than finding jobs for the unemployed is to find space for parking these cars. They are seen jostling together. One cannot see what is happening beyond the car that immediately confronts you. If three cars away, some mechanic thief is tampering with a stranded car and removing the audio system or even carrying away the battery, who will notice it?

Everyone is concerned with his own work and attending to his own worries. He may see a mechanic at work but without realizing that ho is a thief who may soon start the car on the pretext of testing it and then flee into oblivion. When the present DGP, Mr. A.C.Sharma some 10 years ago during a discussion on crime in Allahabad on Doordarshan - in which I was a participant too - stated quite emphatically that car lifting had become the first choice of clever criminals, it had come as news indeed. But today he is being proved correct. Car lifting is on the rise in all cities. A survey in Varanasi showed that maximum vehicles had been lifted from the areas near Kutchery, banks, post offices, commercial complexes and even from outside the houses of the car owners. This is more or less true in the case of all districts.

As regards theft of cars from residential areas, this is usually done at night though at other places it is during office or working hours in the day that such thefts take place. Interestingly enough, 70 per cent of vehicles are lifted in daytime and 75 per cent of them in Varanasi were found to be two wheelers.