I’m surpised to read this in today’s Times, I always thought that it was the vast rural classes in India that were backwards. Yet it seems that the well-to-do middle classes are going as low as to pay private eyes to hound their own kids. At least the rurals have an excuse, they are poverty stricken and uneducated, what reason these people have for such suspicious shenanigans I can’t fathom.
May 30, 2003
Families in India keep a private eye on their children
From Ian MacKinnon in Delhi
WHEN Priya Sharma went away to medical school in Bangalore, she revelled in the freedom from the shackles of her family home in Delhi. Instead of an 8pm curfew there were parties, drink and boys.
In the second year Priya’s attendance record slumped, as did her marks. Worried teachers called her wealthy timber merchant father, Yogesh Sharma, 57, and her mother, Janaki, 45, (their names have been changed) with their concerns.
The Sharmas tried with limited success to find out what she was up to. Eventually they hired a private detective to spy on her every move.
They are not alone. More and more parents among India’s burgeoning middle classes have done the same. Their children, products of the MTV generation, are making the most of an explosion of bars and internet chat rooms that fly in the face of India’s conservative family values, especially when it comes to the arranged marriage market.
“It was an extremely difficult decision to go to a detective,” Mrs Sharma said. “I cried when I went to him.”
Worse was to come. After a week of snooping the detective discovered that Priya was smoking, taking drugs, getting drunk and publicly kissing a succession of boys.
Priya’s parents summoned her to Delhi and told her that they knew from classmates what she was up to. For now Priya’s wayward behaviour has moderated. The Sharmas know how their daughter is behaving because the detective, for fees up to £1,000 a week, has tailed her twice more, although Priya does not know.
Kunwar Vikram Singh, managing director of the Delhi-based Lancers detective agency, handles about six such cases in the city each month and counsels caution to families when their suspicions are borne out by his dossiers.
“I know I’m giving them a weapon,” he said. “But they risk alienating their child forever, so I advise them to tread carefully and on no account reveal they hired a detective.”
Discovery can be disastrous. Brinda Adige, who runs a children’s helpline in Bangalore, has intervened in a number of cases. “It’s a very dangerous strategy,” she said. “It’s a huge betrayal of trust. There’s no way back once the child knows their parents have paid someone to follow them.”
India’s cloying family culture forces many to take the risk. Fear of scandal that might blight their offspring’s prospects for an arranged marriage, regarded by Indian parents as their most important duty, pushes them on.
“This is still not a ‘courtship culture’, Patricia Uberoi, a Delhi-based sociologist, said. “Men still expect to marry virgins.”
What to do..,what to do? 
