B'lore to have 3-tier police structure

Pronab Mohanty to be Addl Commissioner (Crime); Law & Order gets Joint Commissioners

The government that went for a rehaul of the State police, effecting transfers of officials of Inspector General of Police rank and above, has also gone in for restructuring of the City police.

Raghavendra H Auradkar has thus been brought back as the City police commissioner. The government has also brought in a three-tier structure of supervision for both law and order and crime in the City.

With Pronab Mohanty being promoted to IGP rank, he has now been rechristened Additional Commissioner (Crime), City, which includes Central Crime Branch. Thus, the Crime division has a three-tier structure of a DCP (Crime), Joint Commissioner (Crime) and Additional Commissioner (Crime).

In the Law and Order division, two new posts of Joint Commissioners have been created under the Additional Commissioner (Law and Order). The City has been divided into two zones – East and West. S Ravi, who was DIG, Prisons, has been appointed Joint Commissioner (Law and Order, West) and Bijay Kumar Singh, who was Director (Security and Vigilance), KSRTC, has been appointed Joint Commissioner (Law and Order, East).

Auradkar told Deccan Herald that it was a good move to strengthen policing in the City.
He said the City had grown by leaps and bounds in the past decade and the City Commissionerate was the largest in the State with 110 police stations. He said that the new Joint Commissioners would be the first line of supervision above the DCPs and this would lead to a close supervision and better co-ordination of policing.

Kamal Pant, Additional Commissioner (Law and Order) said that the seven police divisions in the City would be divided between the two joint commissioners and each would be made incharge of about half the number of police stations. He said this would decentralise the apparatus.

However, there are some naysayers to the restructuring. A senior official in the City police complained that in the new set-up, it was more top heavy. He said presently, a police inspector manning a police station was answerable to his sub-divisional ACP, the divisional DCP, the Additional Commissioner (Law and Order) and the City Commissioner, apart from DCP (Crime) and Joint Commissioner (Crime). He said another layer of hierarchy had been added to the structure with a Joint Commissioner below the Additional Commissioner (Law and Order).