Not so long ago, justice was rare in Dharavi, Mumbai’s largest slum.
Women beaten by their husbands received little attention at the busy local police station. Families cheated or harassed rarely had the time and money to lodge a formal complaint and see their case through an often years-long court process. And police, indifferent to slum dwellers or afraid to face hostile residents, only rarely bothered to enter the shantytown’s narrow, mazelike streets to investigate crimes.
“Police felt the slum dwellers were all squatters, criminals. Slum dwellers felt police were the oppressors, who only listened to the rich and would not hear legitimate complaints,” remembers A.N. Roy, until recently Mumbai’s police commissioner.
But that uneasy relationship has undergone a remarkable transformation thanks to an innovation of Roy’s that is quickly becoming an international model: the police panchayat, or police council.
At the Kaylan Wadi Police Beat 3 in Dharavi, sari-draped local women with yellow police identification cards hanging from their necks operate what is effectively a police station in a one-room community organizing hall that also houses a micro-credit bank. Beneath a huge aerial photo of the slum, the women–backed by a few male colleagues and a single police officer–take complaints, haul in offenders and negotiate resolutions to domestic violence and harassment cases, minor thefts, property disputes and other petty crimes, usually within days.
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Large drop in crime
In a little over two years, their corner of the massive slum has seen crime drop by an estimated 30 percent to 50 percent, Roy said. Violence against women, in particular, has been slashed and police, once stymied in efforts to investigate slum murders and rapes, now have plenty of knowledgeable deputies tracking down clues.
“It’s 100 percent improving life for people here,” said Malti Ambre, the senior police “commissioner” of the Kaylan Wadi group. “What we are doing is a hundred percent good.”
Panchayats–the word means “council of five”–have been used for centuries in Indian villages to make decisions and resolve disputes. The police panchayats follow a similar model, with members essentially serving as arbitrators who aim to settle simmering disputes before they turn into crimes and keep minor crimes out of the court system.
The panchayats, each made up of seven local women and three men, have no formal power to call in, sentence or discipline offenders. What they offer instead, said Arputham Jockin, president of the National Slum Dwellers Federation, is “instant justice”–an alternative to the uncertainties of pushing a case through the country’s notoriously slow and overburdened court system.
Offenders are told, “Look here. If you people keep fighting, a crime will get registered and you’ll have to go to court and trial. You’ll lose so much time and money,” Roy said. “The combination of pressure from the community and legal authority is a lethal combination for resolving disputes. People see reason.”
In one recent case, he said, panchayat members hauled in two feuding men who together bought a one-room shack, then began threatening each other and demanding sole ownership after the partnership soured.
With neighbors scared the two would kill each other, the panchayat sat them down and talked the dispute through. Eventually they reached a decision–formalized in a legal agreement–that the man who worked a day-shift job would get custody of the shack at night, while the night-shift worker would stay there during the day. Case solved.
One panchayat, he remembers, also managed to smooth out the potentially explosive “kidnapping” of a Hindu girl by her Muslim boyfriend. To escape their disapproving parents, the pair had run away together, leaving a trail of angry threats behind them. Panchayat members managed to bring the couple back, call in their parents and, after lengthy negotiations, persuade the parents to allow the couple to marry.
The panchayat’s work “is a strong preventive measure,” Roy said. “They resolve disputes at the local level so things don’t convert into crime.”
Panchayat members are chosen in consultation with local non-government groups that work in the slums and usually have already identified reliable community leaders, Roy said. More women than men are chosen, he said, because women are more often crime victims and because “in my experience women are naturally better endowed to resolve disputes. They are more tolerant, more accepting, more understanding.”
Women panchayat officials, many of them poor and illiterate, say the program has boosted their self-confidence, given them new respect and generally improved life for women in Dharavi and other slums.
“My husband used to beat me, but now not only am I respected, my husband is afraid of me,” said Akulekha Javed Khan, 35, one of the Kaylan Wadi panchayat members. In the area her panchayat supervises, residents have agreed on a local rule that if a man insists on a divorce over his wife’s objections, he must leave and the woman keeps the house, a reversal of the traditional order. As a result, “my husband’s whole attitude has changed,” Khan said.
“I am a more relaxed person,” she added, smiling and adjusting her pink and white flowered sari. “I laugh now.”
Others follow model
Since starting in 2003 in Pune, where Roy previously served as police commissioner, the community policing effort has grown to 230 panchayats scattered through the slums of Mumbai and nearby Pune, serving a population of 3.5 million to 4 million slum dwellers, Roy said. Panchayats based on the Mumbai model also have popped up in Sri Lanka and the Philippines, and officials from countries ranging from Thailand to South Africa have visited to take a look at the program, said Roy, who this month was appointed a director general of police.
Not all of the panchayats–some established little more than three months ago–are working effectively, Roy said. But in those that are, like Kaylan Wadi, 90 percent of cases are resolved without going to court.
As she sits in the station on a recent morning, Ambre’s cell phone rings. The previous day she and the council members had visited the home of a husband who had beaten his young wife. The man refused to talk to the panchayat, and Ambre referred the case to court.
Court officials quickly sent a summons. Then the startled young man changed his mind. Could he attend a panchayat session after all, he asked Ambre.
The commissioner just smiled, and set a time.
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