A Peep Into Police Stations in Assam

STAFF REPORTER

GUWAHATI: Police stations are generally tagged as ‘breeding grounds for corruption’. What leads police stations to earn such a distinction? Doesn’t the government have any role to play in such a tag? Let’s have a peep into all those taking place in police stations across Assam.

As and when a person is kept in the lock-up in a police station, there comes the question of serving him/her a meal. Where will the money come from? Back in the day, Rs 1.25 was provided per meal and that too, after billing annually. The system has been stopped long back. Now the cost of meal burns holes in the pockets of the officer-in-charges (OCs) and other officers in police stations.

The police have the responsibility of conducting post-mortem and last rites of unclaimed bodies. Since post-mortem is done in government hospitals, they don’t have to pay for that. However, handling bodies and burying them up need sweepers who charge not less than Rs 4,000 per body. Who’ll bear the cost? The OC or other officer concerned of the police station has to bear this expenditure. The Railways, on the contrary, pays Rs 5,000 to the RPF (Railway Protection Force) for the last rites of every unclaimed body found in trains.

If police personnel find a stolen vehicle, it is their duty to bring the vehicle with a crane and hand it over to its owner. However, the police station has to bear the expenditure of hiring the crane as the government doesn’t make any payment for that.

Even as there has been a boom in the use mobile phone these days, the use of landline telephone cannot be ruled out in policing. However, in most of the police stations in the State, the landline phones are either dead due to technical reasons, or due to non-payment of piling bills.

This is not all. A police station, according to sources, gets only ten litres of fuel per day for the vehicles that run under it. Ten litres is far too less for a police station that has to ply its vehicles every now and then.

Talking to this reporter, an official of a police station said, “We’ve many other areas where we’ve to spend from our pocket, and that’s not a big deal for us. We need to pay a sweeper who cleanses the police station. We’re used to it. We even purchase stationeries like paper, pen, staplers and the like. The government literally washes its hand just by recruiting a few personnel to man a police station and giving them a structure that can be used as a police station.”

He further said, “Even now the government seeks the bill for serving meal to people in lock-up at the rate of Rs 1.25 per meal, annually. Can anybody feed a person in lock-up with Rs 1.25? Does a police station have enough time to make bills at the rate of Rs 1.25 per meal and submit it to the government annually? We just bear the cost from our own pocket.”

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