Couples banned of Agra cafes on new year eve

VISHAL SHARMA

INDIA (AGRA), 31 Dec. New year comes knocking at the doors this night but instead of sending greetings and chatting across the seas while huddling close together in a cosy "cyber-cafe" in this chilly weather, love-birds of Agra are now preferring to browse the net from the safety of their homes.
With police raids becoming common on cyber cafes of Agra division in connection to porn being displayed on computer screens to minor "couples" inside closed cabins, the cafe owners of Agra have decided to ban the entry of "couples" in their cafes, stripping down the doors of the cabins constructed inside their cafes as the police is not projecting the cafes as possible porn joints.
Making hay at the same time, big telecom giants running broadband cafes like Satyam's "i-way" & Reliance's "webworld" have launched a publicity campaign assuring youngsters of "Safe and Secured Surfing", displaying posters, banners & hoardings on the roadsides to attract youngsters. In its Christmas advertisements in Agra, Reliace's Webworld has clearly mentioned the fact that its webworlds are completely "secure".
Talking to UNN on Friday, Mugeev Khan who runs an "i-way" in the Tajganj area of Agra said that the police seems to have made "cyber-cafes" synonymous to "porn-shops". He said that out of every 10 users coming to his cafe, atleast 3-4 are just casual browsers, who only search porn sites, but this does not mean that he is running a pornography joint at his cafe.
He said that every new year eve, his cafe used to be jam-packed with couples chatting on the internet and sending mails to their fiends, but this year, the situation is very different. Young girls are totally avoiding coming to cafes and even youths who enter his cafe prefer to keep out till the cafe is free from girls. He said that the police raids on cyber-cafes by the police would only serve to dissuade the tourists from entering cyber-cafes, fearing that they would be falsely implicated in a "shameful" offence by the police merely for being present in the cafe.
Sanjeev Singh, the owner of Singh Cyber Cafe at Sanjay Place, Agra's commercial hub, where the police had conducted a raid recently, arresting 44 couples, said that the police raids have served to build up an atmosphere of fear in the cafe owners of Agra who, after a meeting of the Cafe owners association, have decided to paste notices on their doors prohibiting couples from entering their cafes.
Also, it was decided that the cafes that had the facility of cabin shall strip down the doors of these cabins to provide a full view of the activties of the browsers inside the cabin, especially in the Sanjay Place area, which is being primarily targeted by the police owing to the high density of cafes in the area.
The recent police raids on cyber cafes in Agra and Aligarh give clear indications that after casinos, brothels, betting booths & pubs, the police has now included cyber-cafes in its "hit-list". According to the Senior Superintendent of Police Agra, Rajiv Krishna , the Station Officers of the respective police stations have been directed to keep a strict vigil on the cyber-cafes being run in their area to ensure that the cyber cafes do not get transformed into porn-joints at any time.
But all the more disturbing is the fact that the policemen who had raided the cyber-cafes in Agra and Aligarh are now being charged by the locals for "framing" most of the youth who were caught at those places. In this context, the incident of a policeman hitting a young girl during a raid on a cyber cafe in Aligarh is also being quoted as an evidence against the police on which, the Chief Minister of UP Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav himself was forced to issue a clarification, suspending the culprit policeman.
Khyati, a student of Journalism & Mass Communication in Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Agra said that the study of journalism requires an extensive use of the internet and information technology but despite the need, she is not visiting any cafe she is afraid that if the police raided that particular cafe when she was in the cafe and she is much more concerned of her parents' dignity than her studies, so he has decided not to use cyber cafes for internet and at present, she is using a computer at her friend's place for browsing the net.
(UNITED NEWS NETWORK)

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