Blank screen crime.

"Murder cases dipped by around 3% in 2023 compared to 2022, compared to data released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)." Gross numbers are not enough. What we want to know is how many cases succeeded in conviction and how they were punished. "A staggering 1,217 lives were lost daily in accidents in 2023, an increase of around 3% over the previous year." TOI. Probably because of an absence of traffic police on our roads. In September 2024, "A biker died after he crashed into a car driven on the wrong side of the road in Gurugram." NDTV. On the other hand, in June 2025, the Himachal Pradesh High Court exonerated a car driver involved in a fatal accident, "noting that the car was being driven on the correct side of the road, but the motorcycle had suddenly appeared from the wrong side of the highway at an intersection." livelaw.in. Still no police and people still driving recklessly. However, "When the screen at Prime Minister Modi's rally in Banswara went dark for ten minutes, the fallout was swift: Rajasthan's infotech secretary Archana Singh lost her job." But, for years taxpayers have been penalized billions of rupees for late payment because of faults in the portals run by the Finance Ministry preventing people from paying on time. No one has been punished till date, wrote Dilip Cherian. Ten minutes of blather is more important than citizens' lives. The Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy's State of the System reveals "there are 7,305 crimes that one may be prosecuted for, across 370 laws." "A wide range of laws criminalize simple acts of non-compliance: filing documents late, failing to maintain records or inadvertently failing to facilitate a public official." Trivial they maybe, but they "attract the harshest punishments, including imprisonment." TOI. Recently a 22-year-old college student died when she fell off her two-wheeler while trying to avoid a pothole in Bengaluru. News18. No one held responsible. The Indian bureaucracy hides its incompetence behind a plethora of documents. "The State took it upon itself to categorise the population as 'eligible' and 'ineligible'; after all, corruption enables the 'ineligible' beneficiary to access the State. But to achieve this goal, the bureaucracy appropriated the power to verify its own documents, casting suspicion both on its documents and, rather conveniently, on those in possession of these documents," wrote Yamini Aiyar. Cybercrimes rose 31% in 2023 to 86,420 registered cases from 66,381. TOI. Indians are easy to scam just by imitating a government official over the phone, wrote Partha Sinha. "You haven't committed a crime, but the voice implies you probably have. Something ancient in your spine activates. A lifetime of bureaucratic conditioning kicks in." "As Ashis Nandy observed, colonial power in India wasn't dismantled - it was domesticated. The Viceroy became the Collector. The Queen's English morphed into affidavit Hindi. But the emotional dread stayed perfectly intact." Indians scammed and criminalized. Blank screen unacceptable.