Police working on guidelines to regulate PG facilities

In a knee-jerk reaction of sorts to the recent rape of a resident of a paying guest accommodation in Electronics City here, the Bangalore Police are working on guidelines to regulate and monitor PG facilities to ensure the safety of their inmates.

The guidelines are expected to be ready within two to four weeks. The proposed guidelines would be modelled on the lines of those existing in other states.

Accordingly, PG owners would be asked to get police verification done of the paying guests antecedents and occupation with the area police station. 

Speaking to Deccan Herald on Monday, Police Commissioner Raghavendra H Auradkar said: “We are framing the guidelines based on certain rules and Acts in collaboration with the BBMP and other stakeholders. The same will be then placed before the competent authorities. We will also be seeking suggestions from the general public, Residents Welfare Associations and legal experts.” 

Admitting that an earlier exercise to form a database of PG facilities in the City could not reach its logical conclusion, Auradkar said, “Many areas where the concentration of PG accommodation is more such as Electronics City, we did make some efforts but some of the PG accommodations could have been left out as the numbers we are looking at are huge.”

Strangely, in a city like Bangalore which is an education hub and the silicon city of the country, there are no byelaws governing PG accommodation which have been mushrooming across the length and breadth of the City. 

PG, from Page 1As per a rough estimate, Bangalore has about 14,000-15,000 PG accommodations which cater to the student community, besides the techies who come from across the country.

Incidentally, in other cities such as Delhi and Chandigarh, it is mandatory for the PG accommodation owners to verify the antecedents of their guests and even register their PG accommodation with the competent authority or else it will attract penal action.

In Delhi, if the owner fails to get his paying guest verification done, he could be penalised under section 188 of the IPC. 

Sadly, it took a rape incident for the authorities here to put their heads together and wake up to the need of having regulation in place to ensure security measures for the thousands of paying guests, majority of them being women.