“I can’t walk down the street without getting harassed, I can’t take the metro without men staring at me, and every college that I apply to has 50,000 applications – and it’s only getting worse,” the teenager tells her mother in the first episode. Officers really did wade across a river to find a suspect – and persuaded him to cooperate by threatening to report his crimes to his mother.Ĭhaturvedi’s daughter, a restive teenager eager to leave Delhi for Toronto, is a composite of several people, and serves as a stand-in for wealthier young Indians wrestling with the question of whether to stay and help improve their city or decamp to the US, Australia or Europe. The deputy police commissioner, Vartika Chaturvedi, who oversees the investigation, is based on a real official. The drama is a blend of fact and fiction. Yet a core group of officers doggedly work to catch the six perpetrators, four of whom are still on death row (one ended their own life in prison in 2013 and another, a juvenile, was released in 2015). The depiction of the investigation is warts-and-all: suspects are frequently beaten officers keep trying to bunk work to go home or to the gym lights flicker and then go out when a station can’t afford to pay its fuel bill. “Like that they don’t get to see their families for weeks at a time during an investigation, or that an officer didn’t even have a vehicle to get to the crime scene.” “ as they talked me through their experiences I started to see the limitations they faced,” Mehta says. Delhi’s underfunded, undertrained and endemically corrupt police force were a particular target of the protests that swelled after Singh’s murder.
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The series emerged from six years Mehta spent reading case material and interviewing the authorities involved in the investigation. A still from the new Netflix series Delhi Crime Photograph: Netflix