Bengaluru: A proposal to provide three shifts to the police personal, which comprises of 8 hours per shift, has been proposed by the Home department. This is a welcome move to the police personal who are burdened with long hours of work and have no set periods for their duty. This move can substantially improve the efficiency and accountability of the personal in the force. The eight-hour shift has been a long pending demand of the personal in the police department. The existing minimum hours of work for the personal are 12 Hours. Currently there are about 1.08 lakh personal working in the department with an existing 23,000 vacancies, which have not been filled. The number of vacancies increases as and when a new initiative is executed by the Home Department for instance introducing exclusive units and battalions. By implementing the three-shift plan fatigue could be eliminated and the work pressure could be decreased to a considerable extent said Mr. Raghavendra Auradkar, Additional Director-General of Police (Recruitment) who made the proposal. In the circular that was recently issued by the City Police Commissioner Mr. T. Suneel Kumar to all the DCPs under his jurisdiction, he has given a direction to the DCPs to submit a detailed report on the number of cases registered in the past three years and the staff strength of the police stations in their jurisdiction. He has also mentioned in the circular that there is a need to increase the number of police personal by taking into consideration the population and to create more posts that are necessary. He said the benefit of the 3-shift strategy is to give definite hours of work, which in turn will improve the efficiency of the personal and provide some rest to the police personal who are burdened with work. He said in the present scenario, there are no definite hours of duty for the police personal due to a number of reasons. One of the main reason is the unfair ratio between the existing strength and the sanctioned strength of the police force. He said this shift model has proposed to separate the various department staffs such as crime staff is separated from the law and order staff. The separation is done so that there is an improvement in the detection and investigation process. A senior police officer said to make the shift system work the first issue of staff shortage has to be worked upon by increasing the number of staffs and then the station work force has to be restructured. A senior police officer said to enable the shift system to function an analysis will be conducted with the data that is provided by the DCPs and a session of restructure will be implemented to the staff working in the police station. The police officer said that in the staffing of one police station in many instances the staff was more than what was required while in other police stations they had to manage with a minimum number of staff. Mr. M.A. Saleem, Additional Director-General of Police (Crime and Technical Services) said in the Traffic Department the three shift system has been prevalent since 2005 with the shift timings as 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., and the graveyard shift. This privilege was not given to the law and order staff. This shift system is the need of the hour. If implemented this will increase productivity and reduce the workload. The most important thing is in the restructuring of the force to implement the system effectively. ]]>
