Vadodara: Barodians got an opportunity to do encounter of city’s top cop on social media this week.
In an innovative step, city police commissioner Manoj Sashidhar had decided to interact with the citizens over social media to understand and solve their problems for which queries were invited over last three days with #AskCP. Citizens flooded the Twitter account of city police’s traffic branch with queries and complaints ranging around policy on loudspeakers to rising bootlegging activities to menace of auto-rickshaws to encroachments to e-challans.
But on Saturday, Sashidhar answered 13 questions out of several hundred that were posed over the three days.
One of the users Rishi Kale complained that when his father went to Gotri police station to complain about lost vehicle registration book, he had to wait for hours and was allegedly humiliated by a cop. In response to Kale’s question whether this was part of police duty towards law abiding citizen, Sashidhar asked Kale to mail him on his official email address with all details and assured immediate action. The commissioner also added in his response that the police have recently started Citizens’ Facilitation Centre at Gotri police station which is like a reception centre and first point of contact for citizens.
A Twitter handle ‘white_lotus1979’ asked when will be the supply of illicit liquor come to an end in the city. “The leadership of city police is very committed about strict implementation of prohibition policy and we have zero tolerance approach towards bootleggers. This approach has definitely curtailed the supply of liquor and has led to steep increase in the street-price of illegal liquor, especially IMFL…,” Sashidhar replied.
In a complaint related to illegal encroachments by hawkers in Mangal Bazaar and Nava Bazaar, Sashidhar replied that, both, traffic and local police have filed numerous cases besides the drives by Vadodara Municipal Corporation (VMC). In his response, he also added that while there is a noticeable improvement after these actions, a street vendor policy is needed for sustainable and long-lasting solutions and creation of food courts and vegetable markets should also been seen as efforts in that direction.
When a user Rajan Desai asked what action is proposed when auto-rickshaws operate without fare-meter and overload passengers, the commissioner responded: “We do regular decoy operations and have made out 10,243 against auto-rickshaws which are overloading and over-charging passengers. We have also detained thousands of such rickshaws.”