Chennai: The Tamil Nadu Police has over the years made a special place for itself over the years, in fact one of the best police force in the country, yet there are thousands of position that haven’t been filled.
Say senior police officials’ the huge vacancy was posing a challenge to routine policing as the available strength was inadequate to sustain effective crime prevention/investigation duties.
Special units like the Special Branch CID, which handles the State intelligence and internal security; the Economic Offences Wing; the Coastal Security Group; and the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption are handicapped by vacancies at different levels.
There are 21,000 vacancies in the police force for various ranks across the State and the number is only rising with retirements, reportedly. But for the induction of 8,500 Tamil Nadu Special Police Youth Brigade (TNSPYB) personnel into the force last year, there has been no recruitment of police constables since 2012. The TNSPYB men were still undergoing training and were expected to join the force as Grade-II police constables, police sources said on Sunday.
A police official who did not want to be named said, “About 5,000 new vacancies add up each year due to retirements or deaths. The public-police ratio is dwindling even as the number of crimes is steadily on the rise. The need of the hour is to conduct a massive recruitment programme through the Uniformed Services Recruitment Board. While most of the available manpower goes to VIP security, bandobust for agitations and public meetings, routine work at the station level is being affected”.
The shortage of staff often leads to delay in investigation and filing of charge-sheet in cognizable offences. There should be no compromise in the deployment of men for vehicle checks, night patrolling and traffic regulation, police officials say.
Deployment as orderlies
In spite of an acute shortage of staff in sensitive areas of policing, hundreds of police personnel continue to work as orderlies attending to the camp office (residence) work of police officers.
The official added, “At least 400 vehicles, each with not less than two drivers, run as camp office vehicles across the State. The Director-General of Police has initiated the process of redeploying such manpower/vehicles for police-related work”.
Unlike the Assembly elections where Central para military forces were roped in for security, the State police have to manage the local body polls with the available strength.
“The State has been witness to large-scale violence in local body elections in the past. The existing vacancies are against the sanctioned posts approved several years ago. The sanctioned strength has not been revised in several units for years now though the number of cases has gone up,” another police official said, adding that the added burden of work took a toll on the health of the constabulary.
Police personnel were being diagnosed for hypertension, diabetes and stress-related ailments in the annual health screening camps, he added.]]>
