Odisha cops yet to employ V’wada CMS

While the Odisha Police is dragging its feet to implement the State Government’s decision to put into practice the Vijayawada model of Court Monitoring System (CMS),  taking an alibi of shortage of adequate personnel, experts say that once this model is implemented, it will minimise the burden of manpower on police system.

Way back in 2016, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had announced in the floor of the Assembly that the State Government would implement Vijayawada model of CMS to increase conviction rate, which is abysmally low in the country.

While conviction rate in Vijayawada City Police is 65 per cent, it is as low as 16 per cent in Odisha which is lowest in the country.

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, Chief Secretary Aditya Prasad Padhi and the ACS Home are of one opinion that the Vijayawada model is eminently suitable for raising conviction rate, but the State Police is delaying implementation on the plea that it has less manpower.

However, a detailed study of the Vijayawada model reveals that, as a matter of fact, there will be much less burden on the State Police, reveals a senior top cop in charge of Vijayawada city police.

Vijayawada City Police Commissioner Damodar Gautam Sawang has assigned the CMS to a dedicated team led by senior police Inspector G Srinivas Rao.

Rao is handling the CMS for last two years with a team of 56 officers for 20 police stations in Vijayawada city concerned with 24 courts.

Earlier, while each police station was sending at least eight police personnel to 22 courts, presently each police station is deputing only two personnel to CMS for case monitoring.

Handled by only 56 personnel, the CMS helps saving large manpower to be deployed for law and order. On an average, team CMS is handling 7,800 cases in a year and conviction rate is 65 per cent, said Rao.This proves that the CMS is a very good system to save manpower and now conviction rate is 65 per cent, which was hardly 39 per cent in 2004.

After 14 years of successful implementation of CMS, conviction rate is on the rise and the team CMS is making dogged pursuit and tracking each and every case filed in the courts.

Once a case is filed in any of the 24 courts and the court assigns a case number, then it is transferred to CMS for monitoring.In the Viajayawada CMS, intensive exercise is being carried out to monitor pending cases in courts on day to day basis and strategies are worked out to ensure how effectively these are to be handled.

And with practical experience of handling cases with much less manpower by the City Police, the Government of Andhra Pradesh has replicated the CMS throughout the State.