Constables recruited from North-East arrive in Delhi

Northeasterners can now hope for better security measures

People from the northeastern states living in Delhi can hope for better security measures and a more sensitised police force soon as 443 Delhi Police’s newly recruited constables hailing from the northeast arrived here for training.

The constables were recruited under a special drive. The move is one of the five recommendations of the Bezbaruah committee which was set up in the wake of the murder of northeast student Nido Tania in Delhi in 2013.

The constables arrived in the capital in separate batches this week to start their nine-month long training at the Delhi Police’s Police Training School (PTS) from April 4.
Of the 443, 406 constables have been recruited through a selection process which includies a written and physical test. Thirty seven constables have been nominated from their respective states.

“Of the 406 recruited through the selection process, 285 are men and 121 are women. While 20 from the nominated ones are male, 17 are female,” said a police officer of the Delhi Police’s special unit for the northeast region.

“The committee felt that the creation of a special squad supervised by the North East Special Police Unit would go a long way in ensuring speedy justice in criminal cases against the people of the northeast community,” said the police officer.

“In the nine-month long training in the PTS, the new recruits would be specially trained and sensitised about the problems of people from the northeast,” he added.

Over two lakh people from the northeast migrated to Delhi in the last decade and about 86 per cent of them have faced discrimination, the Bezbaruah committee report said.
The report also blamed Delhi as the worst among the metro cities in terms of racial discrimination against people from the northeast.

Northeastern people in Delhi for the last few years feel that having representatives in the local police will go a long way in reinstating their faith in the police force.

“We don’t get to deal with IPS officers on a daily basis, most of the time our interactions are with the lower level cops who are not very educated and come with a cultural baggage. We feel lot of problems while dealing with them due to our limited knowledge of Hindi, and theirs of English,” said Tshering Lepcha, a PHD scholar from JNU.

“With the arrival of northeast constables in Delhi Police we will feel safe and secured. We can communicate our problems to them better,” Lepcha added.

Those recruited would be posted in areas with high northeast populations like Delhi University, Kotla Mubarakpur, Timarpur, south Delhi and Civil Lines.