7 police stations get ISO stamp, department wants others to follow suit

CHENNAI: Last February, two bike-borne men in Velachery snatched from P K Chowdhury a mobile phone. The Madipakkam resident approached the Guindy police station with a complaint, but a year later, he is yet to hear from the police. This may appear as the norm to many Chennai residents, but to ensure that such laxity does not deter citizens from approaching the law enforcers, the department is planning to roll out a system that will make personnel at every city police station accountable for the complaints registered.
As a pilot project, seven stations in the Ambattur police district have been granted ISO 9001-2015 certification by IQ Net after the agency monitored these police stations for 90 days. While a police station has to respond to a complaint within 24 hours, there is no mechanism in place to ensure that if it fails, the personnel there will be pulled up for negligence. In the new system, a team will collect feedback from the complainant, like e-commerce portals, and initiate necessary action if the complainant is dissatisfied with the police service.

“This is going to be a template for the others to follow, to reach these targets and build a positive image of police among the public,” said city commissioner A K Viswanathan. The city police has instructed respective officers

to bring in a system and obtain ISO certification for their stations. There are 137 police stations in Chennai.

Deputy commissioner of police S Sarvesh Raj told TOI that ISO certification would ensure “accountability for personnel attached to police stations which would be monitored”. “But we have not created anything new. Everything is mentioned in the police standing order, Indian Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC),” he said adding that senior officers want to know the day-to-day activities of their subordinates. “And a daily chart will show if the police personnel are effective. If an officer is inactive, he or she will be pulled up,” he said.

A skill matrix chart will identify the abilities of the police personnel — like maintenance of law and order, handling petitioners and those accused, night patrol, investigation, crowd management and cyber skills.

The personnel will be classified as skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled.

The ISO certification, awarded on February 27, will be valid for three years. M Ram Kumar, consultant at IQ Net, said, “I had stayed at these police stations and observed the real-time work of the police personnel. The consultant will inspect these police stations once in a year to ensure that the standards are being maintained.”