A robber in Calcutta curses his bad luck after his bomb exploded in his hands after a failed attempt at bank dacoity on Tuesday.

CALCUTTA, May 7: Daredevil, armed robberies are now committed daily in Calcutta placing the Marxist government in an embarrassing spot. The latest incident occurred this afternoon just behind Writers' Buildings, the heavily policed state secretariat, when a group tried to bomb-charge its way into a bank.

The attempt failed because of unprecedented public resistance. While three members of the gang made a getaway in a taxi, a bomb exploded in the hands of the fourth.

As he lay bleeding on the street, a huge crowd spewed its collective rage on the city's inept police administration which continues to claim, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that Calcutta is still a ``safe'' metropolis.

Yesterday , three incidents of armed robbery were reported within a span of eight hours in the bustling northern part of the city. Two of them were committed in the same police station area. These were all hit-and-run operations by mobile gangs who sprang upon shopkeepers with weapons and used bombs to scare away possible resisters.

Not just looting on the streets, but of late, heavily guarded apartment complexes have also been raided in Calcutta. Incidents of murder for love or revenge are also more frequent in 1997 than a year ago.

Whereas Home Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya could claim, while presenting last year's police budget that Calcutta was ``safer than Mumbai and Delhi'', this year he admitted that the crime graph is going up.

The alarming rise of chain-snatching on busy intersections has led to the focussing of public attention on the police's ineffectiveness.

In late April, two teenagers who had been spreading terror as motor-bike riding snatchers in south Calcutta, were arrested. They were found to be boys from well-to-do homes who robbed for pocket money.

In January, robbers broke into the flat of a businessman and murdered him for money. This was followed by an armed attack on a flat in a plush apartment complex.

The city's present police commissioner, Dinesh Vajpayee, maintains that while the crime rate has gone up, things are still not alarming. His minister disagrees. ``The police force has been warned to take action on a war footing. There can be no complacency.''

Senior police officials think that one of the major causes behind the spurt in criminal activity could be the eviction of hawkers. ``We now have four lakh more unemployed people in Calcutta. They have no recourse but take to crime to feed their families,'' said an officer. However, Transport Minister Subhash Chakravorty, supervising the exercise, says, ``This is no excuse.

They would have taken to crime long ago if there was a criminal streak in them.''

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.