Imagine a car or mobile of yours being stolen. You have to visit the police station and spend a couple of hours filing a complaint. This is the general scenario people face. But if minister of state for home in Gujarat Harsh Sanghavi is to be believed, soon this will be thing of the past.
He said that in a pilot project, the government is working on a system whereby people in Ahmedabad can register their complaints online through an application. The police will then come to your place, he said. Speaking at a programme, Building Bridges, organised by Ahmedabad Police in association with Gujarat Media Club, Sanghavi said this is the age of new age policing.
He said that the challenges in the coming days are that of cybercrime and economic offences and for which the department needs to have experts so that for convictions the chargesheets are filed on technical grounds.
The minister said that they are trying to revise the policy so that these kinds of experts can be paid more. "Will you get an expert for a salary of Rs 40,000," he asked. Speaking about various measures, he said that the decision of revising the reward policy, on a trial basis, has paid off well and quite a number of drug peddlers have been arrested.
When it comes to new age policing, the Ahmedabad Police has already initiated several measures to eliminate paper and go digital, backed by data. Ahmedabad Police Commissioner Sanjay Srivastava said that 12,250 out of the 13,500 cops with the city police are using the Tarkash app. With the aid of the application and the virtual dashboards, the performance of the police can also be tracked and analysed. The police have done away with giving physical memos for traffic violations.
As part of modernisation, Ahmedabad Police have also introduced taser guns, non-lethal weapons, for its use. Connected to thin wires, the gun fires darts and once it comes in contact with the human body, it gives an electric shock that disturbs the nervous system, thereby resulting in temporary incapacitation. Srivastava said that by doing so, the police gets five to ten minutes to take control of the situation.
