A woman bank manager was brutally attacked yesterday while inside an ATM in Bangalore yesterday. Apart from the gruesome attack on the lady, what has been bizarrely shocking has been the response of the police to the same.
Facts: On Nov. 20, a woman, who is also a bank manager (not clear if she was the manager of the same bank as the ATM), was attacked brutally by a gun-wielding attacker, who hit her on the head with a machete after she resisted his demand to withdraw cash and hand it to him. The lady, Jyothi Uday, was attacked at 7.10 a.m., and lay unconscious for three hours until 2 schoolchildren saw her and raised an alarm. The right side of her body has reportedly been paralyzed due to the attack. Incidentally, the ATM is located in the LIC divisional office building, 50 metres away from a police station. (Read more here and here)
While the police have launched an extensive manhunt for the assailant (the entire incident has been recorded on CCTV), in a bizarre development, the Home Minister for Karnataka, has also done the following:
1. The Karnataka Government has set a 3-day deadline within which all banks have to provide security guards at all ATM kiosks.
2. ATMs that do not have this security may be locked up/shut down.
The specific statement is: “We are aware that Banks are governed by RBI guidelines. But law and order is a state subject and so we have powers to act against them to ensure Tuesday’s incidents do not recur…”
(This report was published here.)
So, if I may re-frame the argument for the Karnataka government, it is essentially saying:
Law and order is a state subject. That is, the state government has the responsibility to ensure law and order for its citizens. This is usually done by ensuring a well functioning police force, which is alert, and has a good response time. In this case, we do not have either. The lady was lying inside an ATM for 3 hours. The shutter of the ATM was down, when it is usually open. And we had to be alerted by schoolchildren. To get over our inability to provide security, we will force banks to hire security guards. We do not care if this increases the cost of running ATMs substantially. We also do not care if many ATMs have to be shut down, depriving people of access to an easy source of quick, and cheap cash dispensers. We may do a really really bad job of ensuring public safety, but by forcing banks to hire security guards, we can easily solve this problem. Not only do we not have to solve the problem to having to think hard and figure out ways to ensure a better police force, we also do not have to worry about boring stuff like financial inclusion, etc. Tomorrow if pedestrians are killed in road accidents, we will similarly ban people from crossing the road, and force them all to buy cars. So what if many people can then not walk on the road.
All hail our fewi-quik governance.
Anirudh Burman 
And so, we will not even provide you with police, but ask banks to do this – privatising security services – which is one of the few clearly sovereign functions performed by the state. (of course, UK and some others have done that too – but that is another story). Clear case of controversialising bank’s role instead of addressing hard questions of persistent state failures!
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