Jaipur: In a major move, Rajasthan Police headquarters (PHQ) has initiated a comprehensive review of police-station staffing to better match manpower with the policing demands of individual stations.For the first time in decades, a committee of senior officials is evaluating police stations, not solely on the basis of their urban or rural classification, but also on factors such as volume of crimes, population, geographical spread, traffic and law-and-order responsibilities.Speaking to TOI, DGP Rajeev Kumar Sharma said the review aims to address the peculiar challenges faced by individual police stations.“As of now, the categorisation is primarily into urban and rural police stations. That, however, is not always enough. For instance, the police station with jurisdiction over the Khatu Shyam Ji temple in Sikar is a relatively small one, but it has the large responsibility of managing throngs of devotees,” Sharma, who constituted the committee to examine the issue, said.The exercise, he added, seeks to answer a basic question: why should a police station handling lakhs of pilgrims be staffed based on the same logic as one that rarely sees major crowds?The committee, consequently, is assessing what each police station has to deal with on a day-to-day basis, whether it be high crime, a large geographical expanse or unique law-and-order challenges.The review comes amid a long-standing demand to rationalise personnel strength in police stations. Senior officials pointed out that some police stations require more personnel than their size or classification would otherwise merit because of the volume of workload they handle.Rajasthan Police currently has eight ranges and two commissionerates, under which there are 49 police districts and a total of 1,052 police stations. The exercise could help address manpower shortages by ensuring that personnel are deployed according to the policing needs of individual stations.Rajasthan Police has a sanctioned strength of 2,142 police inspectors, against which only 1,181 are currently deployed. Similarly, against a sanctioned constabulary strength of 82,602, there are 71,792 constables deployed.Sources in PHQ said the exercise could go beyond simply moving personnel between police stations. If the committee finds that existing police-station boundaries no longer correspond to actual policing burdens, it could recommend redrawing jurisdictions and reorganising police-station areas.The committee may also consider the principle of ‘time and distance’ — the time taken by a police team to reach a location and the distance between a police station and the farthest point within its jurisdiction. This would bring response time and geographical accessibility into decisions on how police stations are staffed and where their jurisdictional boundaries lie.
