New Delhi, Aug. 31: If your red Santro has been stolen in Delhi, it could be because another red Santro was smashed up in an accident in Ranchi.

And chances are the thieves had targeted your car specifically because it met their specifications.

Police and sources with links to the car insurance business say cars are now stolen “on demand” — that is, to meet orders specifying make and colour from garages that sell stolen cars.

“Cars are no longer stolen at random,” said Sant Kumar Sharma, who runs the website carchor.com which helps insurance companies retrieve stolen cars.

“When a car is damaged in an accident the insurance company auctions it as scrap. A dealer in stolen cars then buys it at a higher price along with the registration certificate (RC),” Sharma explained.

“The word then goes round the market about a scrap with an RC, and cars of similar make and colour get stolen across the country. The RC is forged many times over and used as a document for the stolen cars that are sold in various places in the country.”

Delhi police sources said the cars stolen most often are the Santro, Zen, Innova, Tavera, Qualis, Scorpio, Bolero and the Ford Ikon.

The demand from the front-end of the market also depends on where the car will be used, Sharma said.

“If the car stolen from, say, Delhi or Mumbai is a Scorpio or a Bolero, it is likely to be used in Kargil, Leh or Himachal.”

Officers said most of the small or mid-sized cars stolen in Delhi and its neighbourhood are sent to the northeastern states and Nepal. The bigger and snazzier cars are sold in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

On April 8, the police arrested a gang of auto thieves that had stolen more than 100 Honda Citys and Mahindra Scorpios in the past three years from residential colonies in Delhi and Noida.

“The gang stole luxury cars on demand from receiver gangs in Assam, which asked them for select cars from Delhi and Noida,” DCP (Northeast) Jaspal Singh said.

National Crime Record Bureau data show 89,880 motor vehicles were stolen in India in 2006, the estimated figure for 2007 being 87,936. “The market is spread across India, with an annual turnover of more than Rs 250 crore,” an officer said.

“The thieves are extremely professional. After we busted a five-member gang in 2001, we found out that each of them specialised in one particular job. One was an expert duplicate key maker, another an ace driver, a third skilled at faking documents in a jiffy… and so on,” a police officer said.