Around 2 lakh surveillance cameras, 350 automatic number plate detection cameras, and over 500 checkpoints guarded by traffic police. And yet, Delhi is choked each day by traffic snarls caused partly by the plying of illegal vehicles.

The rot runs deeper. In fact, an organised racket has enjoyed unbridled control on the movement of illegal traffic, with help from two essentials – the taftishi (or the middleman) and the marka syndicate. This is what a month-long investigation by Newslaundry found, with one of the city’s 50 traffic circles as a case study.

But this is a system that has existed for decades, some of those part of this ring told us.

‘I keep everyone happy’

It was sheer coincidence that when we were talking to Jitendra, sitting in the tractor he drives for a living, a man arrived on a scooter. We were at Gagan Chowk, in the Nand Nagri neighbourhood of north-east Delhi. After much coaxing, Jitendra had agreed to talk on camera with us about underhand payments that allow illegal vehicles to move freely on Delhi roads. 

However, the moment he saw the other man park his scooter in front of the tractor, Jitendra asked us to stop recording. “That’s Ajay Tyagi,” he said and asked us to let him go, looking uneasy. “Things have got really messy today,” he said to us. 

Meanwhile, Ajay Tyagi called out to me. “Come down, bhai. Why are you doing all this?” he asked. Clearly, he knew we were journalists. “You people found only my area to come to? You could have gone somewhere else.” 

He laughed and invited us to join him for a bite. “Look, bhai, I keep everyone happy. In the entire Nand Nagri Circle, I have the only point where you will not see any policeman. Because I keep them so happy that they don’t need to come here,” he said. 

Tyagi is a taftishi, a middleman who takes money from tractor drivers and ensures they can ply their routes without any interference from the police. The legal term for this is extortion and is punishable by death, life imprisonment or 10 years’ imprisonment under Section 308 of the Bhartiya Nyay Sanhita.

Middlemen like the taftishi, who are also known as “investigators”, have divided the city of Delhi between them. Those who pay them say these middlemen work like a link between the Delhi police and drivers of commercial vehicles that are operating in the capital (often illegally). 

Tyagi’s area is Tahirpur point. Every month, Jitendra pays Tyagi and two other taftishi Rs 2,000 each to ensure he is able to drive his tractor in Delhi without being flagged by the traffic police. “I pay Rs 6,000 every month to the investigators so that I can drive the tractor through the three points. If you don’t pay, you will not be able to drive the vehicle and the tractor will also be shut down,” Jitendra told Newslaundry. 

Organised crime to organise traffic

According to a TomTom report, Delhi was one of the most traffic-congested cities in the world in 2022 and the Central Road Research Institute has estimated that every day, 70 lakh vehicles take to the capital’s streets. 

Exacerbating this problem is the presence of illegal vehicles, to which Delhi police seems to turn a blind eye. The vehicles are considered illegal for a variety of reasons, ranging from not having the necessary permit to violating regulations about the number of passengers allowed. Those operating these vehicles are usually among the downtrodden. For different reasons, they find themselves with no option other than to submit to the demands made of them. Drivers like Jitendra allege the police are colluding with extortionists who force drivers to pay in exchange for their vehicles being able to move freely across the city.