Female detectives storm male bastion

New Delhi: Women are making a mark in India's male bastion of private detectives.

Drawing inspiration from the crime thrillers of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, most of them seem to be succeeding where their male counterparts are struggling.

Taralika Lahiri, a native of Kolkata, was born and raised in Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh state and came to Delhi in 1986.

A couple of years later, she found a job as a marketing executive for security systems in the Globe Detective Agency.

One day the agency was asked to handle a case by Allahabad Bank.

"Since I was familiar with Allahabad city, I was sent on this case involving embezzlement of accounts. Ten days later, I prepared an exhaustive report and was given the designation of Manager, Investigations," says the 48-year-old ace detective.

"By nature I am inquisitive. And the adventurous spirit added to the profession. I had the capability and good fortune to solve complicated cases in two days, compared to my counterparts who would spend a fortnight working on similar cases," she says.

Prestigious schools

Lahiri soon opened her own agency, National Detectives and Corporate Consultants, in south Delhi's Panchsheel Park.

She covers all areas of investigation including legal, financial, pre- and post-marital relationships, pre-employment verifications and corporate cases. Among her clients are those from many parts of India and some from the US, UK and Canada.

"Prestigious schools hire our services for address verification of students and even to track movements of students whom they suspect of bunking school and indulging in undesirable activities including drug abuse and visits to pubs and cinemas.

Contentment

Lahiri says her 20 years in the profession have been full of satisfaction. A year ago she opened the Academy of Investigation and Intelligence Management. The institute offers a minimum of 200 hours of classroom instruction followed by on-the-job training. The one-month course costs Rs15,000 (Dh1,363) .

"It covers an exhaustive curriculum that includes surveillance, planning, competitive business intelligence, security management, the technique of lifting finger-prints and even detecting forgeries using ultraviolet and infrared light," she says.

One interesting case involved an official from Maharashtra state who was duped by a conman whom he had paid Rs1 million (Dh909,000) to obtain a medical college seat for his daughter.

"With only a telephone number I tracked him down and went as a decoy customer. The miscreant was trapped and handed over to the Maharashtra Police," she said.

The female detectives befriend housekeepers, drivers and cooks in order to extract information about their subjects.

The next step is to gather evidence using hi-tech gadgets.

A woman riding a motorbike and carrying hi-tech gadgets on Delhi's streets could be Bhavna Paliwal, the Indian Miss Marple, on one of her assignments.

Thirty-two-year-old Paliwal is co-founder of the Tejas Detective Agency, located in West Delhi's Rani Bagh area. The agency was founded in 2003 in association with her mentor, Pradeep Sharma, a retired intelligence officer, who earlier ran the Times Detective Agency.

She is given credit for rescuing a 13-year old girl from Delhi who had been abducted in 2002 by a gang of notorious flesh traders in Orissa.

Paliwal not only managed to crack the missing girl's case, but with the help of Delhi Police she raided their hideout in Orissa and saved the terrified girl.

Small village

Originally from a small village near Agra in Uttar Pradesh state, Paliwal comes from a family of farmers. Her father died when she was six and her mother brought her up along with her two brothers and a sister. After graduating from Agra University in 1998, she moved in with her brother in Delhi.

"He suggested that I enrol in a public relations diploma course and later take up a job."

But as they reached the institute to fill up the form, her brother had a change of heart and asked Paliwal if she would like to go into journalism.

After finishing the course, she worked with a small Hindi newspaper for awhile. Later she left the job and joined the Times Detective Agency.

"With all kinds of fraud happening in matrimonial alliances these days, I seem to have become a wedding detective," says Paliwal.

"But nothing is as simple as it sounds. An investigation could take from days to weeks. But at the end of it all, breaking the news is the most difficult part in fraud cases," she says.