Women are increasingly turning to private detective work because it is a booming business

Having proved they can fly planes, transplant kidneys and launch satellites, Indian women are storming another male bastion where the required skills are less exalted — poking around in trash cans or condoms and peering through binoculars to catch adulterous couples in flagrante delicto.

Women are increasingly turning to private detective work because it is a booming business. The capital, New Delhi, has an estimated 300 agencies, reported the Sydney Morning Herald.

In India’s big cities there are all-women agencies offering everything from checking employee credentials for multinationals to snooping on teenage girls whose parents suspect they turn into jezebels at night.

“It’s never boring. Every case is different and you meet all kinds of people with fascinating personalities and problems,” said Taralika Lahiri, 48, who runs the all-women National Detectives and Corporate Consultants in New Delhi.

 Lahiri enjoys an advantage. Indian society tends to take women at face value. “Women don’t arouse suspicion. People trust us and open up to us. It’s like having the door open all the time,” she says. Lahiri also says it is easier as a woman to winkle information out of cooks, drivers and maids — the main source of information as they are familiar with a family’s dirty linen.

For Bhavna Paliwal, 32, who runs Tejas Detectives from a remote suburb in the capital, altering the way she speaks and dresses before she approaches a maid for information is part of the fun of the job. “The hardest part of the job is telling a young girl excited about getting married that the boy her parents have chosen is a liar or womanizer. Often he’s in a relationship with someone else. Or he’s already been married once. All this is shocking for them and it’s hard to see their plans collapse,” Paliwal says.

Given that arranged marriages are still the bedrock of society, much of the work revolves around pre-marital checks. Parents want to be sure that the man they have chosen for their daughter is indeed the engineer that he claims to be rather than discover, after nuptials and dowry, that he drives a bus.

As dowries get bigger, more young men are turning to fraud to boost their qualifications or employment in the desire to grab a bride with a hefty dowry. With Indian society in flux, the reports that detectives prepare for their clients at the end of an assignment read like the first draft of history because they capture the monumental social changes.

For example, as women embrace careers, enjoy financial independence and experiment with sexual freedom, husbands increasingly suspect working wives of infidelity. Arulmanimaaran Malathy, 39, who owns Malathy’s Women Detectives Bureau in Chennai, says these husbands are often right. The old notions of “dutiful daughter” and “faithful wife” have vanished. Women are often as guilty as men of infidelity, she says.Such is the independence of young urban women that  Malathy’s speciality is “teenage monitoring” for anxious parents who suspect their daughters are dating, drinking, partying or sleeping with someone.

When confronted with photographs showing their daughter canoodling with her beau in a park or restaurant, shattered parents struggle to believe the evidence.  Lahiri has seen a wide range of human weaknesses and foibles in her work. What has struck her in recent years, though, is a new streak of aggressive materialism she attributes to the unprecedented prosperity currently enjoyed by the middle-class.

“Everyone is a moneygrubber,” she says. “Clients want to be absolutely sure that the man or woman they are marrying has plenty of property, land or assets. The richer the better. Some are more concerned with bank balances than trying to find out if the person is decent and honest.”