Thane: The Thane (Rural) police became the proud recipients of two Smart Policing awards instituted by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) at the annual conference on Homeland Security 2019 in New Delhi. Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office Dr Jitender Singh presented the awards on Friday.
While the Smart Cop initiative by former ASP Atul Kulkarni bagged the FICCI prize for innovation, the e-project of developing and adopting a digital platform for imparting “Training to Police Personnel via Live Broadcasting” won the Special Jury Award in the Training and Capacity building category.
Former IG (Konkan Range) Naval Bajaj had chalked out the road map for broadcasting system, which boasts of enhanced security features and offers a safer and time saving alternative. This apart from trimming unnecessary expenses, it keeps police personnel updated at the click of a mouse.
SP Dr. Shivaji Rathod said, “earlier, our staff had to travel far-off places to attend mandated skill sharpening sessions and refresher courses which not only had classroom limitations but also caused manpower shortage for day-to-day policing.
But now with the successful launch of a broadcasting unit at our district headquarters, larger batches are trained at a time through web-casting technology.”
“Training modules on skill sharpening and other aspects of investigations are prepared by expert police officials for imparting lectures on various subjects via web casting to trainees who are sent invitations on their e-mails to participate on a specified date and time at their own workplace online,” informed Dy. SP- Shantaram Valvi.
Various law enforcing agencies across the country have acknowledged the ingenuity and far-sightedness of the smart solutions adopted by the Thane (rural) police.
Reeling under crunch
While the official number of personnel right from the station in-charge to constables stands at around 555, holidays and sick-leave, further narrow the manpower down by 100, limiting the actual strength of on-duty cops to just 450, thus exposing the abysmal police-to-population ratio of a city which has already crossed 14-lakh, in addition to a floating populace averaging 3 lakh.
By Suresh Golani
