PM Calls for Modernization, Expansion of Police Force

The need of the hour is a new breed of motivated and well trained policemen said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday while providing a roadmap for progress to police chiefs on the second day of the three day conclave of top cops in the national capital

In his address the prime minister urged the police to leverage the impact of information technology to combat new-age terror.

“We need a new-age policeman who is more professional, better-motivated, suitably empowered, well-trained, one who places greater emphasis on technology for investigation and other tasks. Emphasis should be on capacity building from the police station level itself, so that the police are better equipped,” he said.

“Each police station should aim at being self-sufficient and needs to be given the required resources in terms of anti-riot gear, better weapons, the nucleus of a mobile forensic unit and be connected to a networked criminal database management system.”

Apart from advocating for modern methodologies Singh also called for more emphasis to be paid to grassroot level policing and added that both qualitative and quantitative changes were required for the police stations that would serve as the nerve centre of the changes he proposed.

“A large increase in the number of police stations along with raising the strength of police stations has to be undertaken,” he said.

“We need far higher numbers of policemen to improve the present low police-population ratio of 145 per 100,000. As a first step, I would urge all of you to do everything possible to fill up the large number of vacancies that exist today at various levels in the police.”

The prime minister also laid emphasis on the training of policemen and urged police chiefs to keep pace with the changing times.

“I understand that on the average a police officer is retrained only once in about 20 years. This is totally inadequate and must be rectified. It would also help if the police were to benchmark their training curricula with the syllabi and training methodologies of police training institutions elsewhere in the world to ensure better quality,” he said.

“The world is changing rapidly, and police training must keep pace with the best in the world.”

(With Internet Inputs)