The Hindu : Security review after tourist's murder

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Mar 20, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

Security review after tourist's murder

THE COLD blooded murder of an Australian woman allegedly by the driver of the taxi she had hired from Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi in the wee hours of this past Wednesday has once again exposed the vulnerability of foreign tourists visiting the Capital. While the authorities are now gearing up to tighten services at the airport, the real challenge lies in breaking the stranglehold of unscrupulous operators who abuse the system to reap profits at any cost.

On the face of it, however, it must be said that the sequence of events leading to the gruesome crime did not expose any gaping holes in the system. The woman had got the pre-paid taxi booked - something which tourists are always advised to do - from a booth run by the Delhi traffic police, instead of getting it from the privately run pre-paid counters. The name of the driver, the details of the taxi and the destination were properly mentioned in the slip, which was later recovered from the place where the woman's body was found.

The traffic police claimed that had it not been for the detailed pre-paid slip, it would have been difficult to nab the alleged culprit. The police now maintain that with the driver, who was well aware of the local topography, suddenly developing a criminal intent there was little anybody could have done about it. But a question can well be asked: what if the woman had approached a private pre-paid counter?

Checks and safety measures against the private operators are just not enough. Passengers coming out of the airport are virtually mobbed by touts and tour operators who pull them to their vehicles, fleece them and even misbehave. Foreign tourists are all the more vulnerable to such touts for obvious reasons.

For their part, the Central Industrial Security Force, which took over the airport security last year, has been carrying out drives against touts and have managed to book well over a thousand of them in the past nine months. But CISF officials claim that the agency rounds up these touts and hands them over to the police or the airport authorities. They are fined but return later. Even the fine amount is miniscule.

Eventually the entire exercise fails to become a deterrent. The access of such operators cannot be controlled as they utilise the visitor's coupon facility to enter the lounge and `poach' on passengers there. The taxi unions have complete control over who would ply from the airport. This leaves little scope for putting in place a proper system of screening or verification in place.

In fact, the situation is not much different at railway stations and bus stands. Tourists taking trains are also at the mercy of touts, hotel operators and auto rickshaw and taxi drivers. Recently, the Delhi police had initiated a drive to put the pre-paid system back in place at railway stations. In such a scenario, the authorities need to focus on how to create enough deterrents in the system so as to keep the erring operators in check.

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