Ernakulam Rural police’s petitioner reach-out programme covers over 25,000 people

The Ernakulam Rural police have reached out to over 25,000 petitioners under ‘Urappu’, a novel mass petitioner reach-out programme launched six months ago.

The programme involves a team of police personnel at the rural police headquarters reaching out to petitioners across all 34 police stations within the rural limits for feedback and rating on a daily basis. The initiative was launched in the wake of a circular issued by State Police Chief Sheikh Darvesh Sahib.

“We didn’t expect the initiative to make such good progress. It was found to have a huge multiplier effect since 25,000 is not a small number. Our team is reaching out on an average of 150 petitioners across all police stations on a daily basis accounting for around 4,500 petitioners a month. Presuming that every petitioner comes from a family of four members, we may have reached out to around one lakh families, which is nearly 7% of the total rural population of around 15 lakh,” said Vaibhav Saxena, District Police Chief (Ernakulam Rural).

At the heart of the programme is a four-member team from the rural police headquarters. They have been diligently ringing up petitioners and submitting daily report to Mr. Saxena without fail. “They have been working with the professionalism matching the customer care system of any corporate entity. Their daily reports complete with basic data of petitioners and their responses to a bunch of queries make monitoring the progress of the system much easier,” said Mr. Saxena.

Under the programme, petitioners are asked about the date of visit and whether they received a digital receipt for their petitions, whether any action was initiated, and about the behaviour of police officers followed by a rating on a scale of 10 points. A feedback report is submitted to Mr. Saxena every day at 11 a.m.

While a rating of ‘average’ is acceptable, ‘bad’ is not, in which case the police station concerned is contacted and asked to make amends. The programme has the added advantage that the stations are aware that they are being monitored from the headquarters. It has a deterrent effect against misbehaving with petitioners.

Petitioners are spared of the hardship of making personal visits to the higher levels in the police hierarchy if they are not happy with the response of the police station where they lodge petitions. “Instead, petitioners have the police reach out to them and tell that they can contact them in the event of their petition not being properly dealt with. In fact, there have been instances where the petitioners who are not used to such a mechanism with the police suspect those calls to be part of some attempted cyberfraud,” said Mr. Saxena.

Published - October 03, 2024 09:45 pm IST