Daya Nayak

Daya Nayak is a police officer from Maharashtra, India. He joined Mumbai Police in 1995, and rose to fame as an encounter-specialist in the late 1990s. As a member of the Detection Unit, he gunned down more than 80 gangsters of the Mumbai underworld. In 2006, he was temporarily suspended, based on allegations of criminal links and disproportionate income by a journalist with underworld links. The Anti-Corruption Bureau could not find any evidence against him, and he was reinstated by the Mumbai Police in 2012. He was transferred to Nagpur in January 2014, and suspended in July 2015 after he reportedly declined to join his new posting at Nagpur fearing his family’s safety. The transfer order was canceled in August 2015, and Nayak was reinstated in January 2016.

Daya Nayak was born in the Yennehole village of the Karkala taluk, Udupi district in Karnataka, in a poor Konkani-speaking family. He studied till the 7th standard in a Kannada-medium school built by his grandfather. In 1979, he came to Mumbai, after his father asked him to earn some money to help the family. He worked at a hotel canteen, sleeping on the hotel's porch. He continued his education while working, and graduated 8 years later from the CES college in D.N. Nagar. After graduating, he started working with a plumber as a supervisor, earning a monthly salary of ₹ 3,000. He continued staying at the hotel until he got a police job.

Daya Nayak joined the Mumbai Police as a trainee in 1995. After completing his training, he was posted to the Juhu police station in 1996. His first encounter killing happened on the night of 31 December, when he shot dead two members of the Chhota Rajan gang after they opened fire on him. Subsequently, he was shifted to the special squad working against the gangsters.

In 1997, he was hospitalised after being shot twice and badly wounded by a gangster. Before being shot, he managed to shoot the criminal dead in front of a huge crowd. By 2004, he had killed 83 gangsters, acquiring reputation as an "encounter specialist". Nayak himself disapproved of the sobriquet "encounter specialist", insisting that he is not a trigger-happy man but was forced to kill gangsters to prevent more "bloodshed and mayhem". He also states that none of his encounter killings have been fake. He slowed down after the deputy chief minister R. R. Patil reined in the encounter specialists.

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