Knives, pistols and ‘aura farming’: Inside Delhi’s teen ‘gangs’

In the cramped, winding lanes of North-East Delhi, boys are picking up knives and country-made pistols before they ever pick up a schoolbook.

Step behind the main roads here and you find a world of the underage offender. Armed with blades and homemade firearms, they don’t just spread fear, some of them deal in death. For months, we walked these lanes, day and night, tracking down the hideouts where these stories begin. We tried to trace the pattern behind each incident, and we sought out the young people who have become part of this world.

Few outsiders ever see this side of North-East Delhi up close. For a striking number of young people here, drifting into a gang and into crime isn’t the exception, it's simply what happens. Most of the time, these stories surface only as a headline in the next day’s paper, then disappear. What draws children toward this life? Is it the neighbourhood they grow up in? Or is it that the system itself never gave them another road to take?

The boys who are already part of this world talk about it almost casually, roaming the streets, and smoking. “We get our knives, our katta [country-made pistols], our pistols from our bade bhai [elder brothers],” they say, but they won’t give up their names. Our reporting found established gangsters, some behind bars, some still free, who supply the weapons and the ammunition and hand out small rewards in return to these underage offenders.

Vinay Tyagi, who spent roughly 15 years in the Crime Branch and the Special Cell covering North-East Delhi, said, “Easy money is the first draw. The second is that the big players, whether they’re locked up or free, actively recruit minors, because the Juvenile Justice Act caps their maximum sentence at three years, no matter the charge. Larger gangs bring these boys in on purpose. And once they’re in, they have their own bills to pay and quotas to meet.”

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