About 30 per cent of police personnel in the City suffer from hypertension and many health hazards. Around 100 policemen have had a stroke and an equal number of them became unable to work after having spinal cord injuries.
These rather depressing statistics on the health of police personnel were presented by the City Police Commissioner, Raghavendra H Auradkar, at a symposium on ‘Crime and Traffic in Bangalore City’ organised by the Advocates’ Association, Bangalore, here on Thursday. “Those who are unable to work have been deployed in the control room,” he said.
Auradkar also mentioned that there were fewer police personnel in the City compared with major cities in the country. “In Bangalore, there are just 141 police personnel for one lakh population whereas there are 600 in Delhi, 450 in Mumbai, 400 in Chennai and 350 in Hyderabad,” he explained.
There are 2,393 vacancies for police personnel in the City; as many as 2,505 regulate the traffic.“Things are not easy for the police force,” Auradkar lamented. “Due to shortage of staff, we work in two shifts but we need three.”
Policing, he went on, had been divided into patrolling, bandobast, investigation and VVIP security. A total of 101 patrol vehicles man the City’s streets. The chief minister’s residence alone requires 75 personnel and 450 are deployed for investigation. For any bandobast duty, 200 police personnel are deployed, he added.
A whopping 19,000 passport applications have to be verified everyday and at least one policeman is assigned to verify each application. “We have to go through all these constraints during our work,” he said.
Pronab Mohanty, Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime), explained the measures taken by the police to ensure security for women.
B Dayanand, Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic), spoke about the steps taken to decongest traffic. In addition to the existing cameras, 100 more cameras would be installed to help in traffic management, he added. He further said the police had identified traffic bottlenecks in the City and the data had been shared with the administration to decongest them.
The bottlenecks are Ramana Maharshi junction to Mekhri Circle, Hudson Circle, Silk Board junction, K R Puram on Old Madras Road near Big Bazaar, Nagavara and Hebbal flyover.
The increasing number of vehicles and poor urban planning were causing traffic congestion, Dayanand added.