LAHORE, Feb 1: The Punjab government is immediately starting the recruitment of 6,000 BA constables for the traffic police as a first step towards transforming it into a modern force capable of handling the ever-increasing load of traffic in big cities, Dawn learnt on Wednesday.

After their recruitment, only those having BA degrees among the existing traffic police staff would be kept on the strength of the traffic police in big cities and the rest would either be sent to normal police or on highways.

“We are issuing newspaper advertisements for new recruitments in a day or two,” a senior official said, adding the new force would be deputed in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Multan, Faisalabad and Gujranwala.

The new constables would be called traffic officers and given specialized training in the traffic management, besides teaching them how to handle urban population with decency, they said.

They would be recruited by the police department on a regular basis and given a monthly salary of at least Rs10,000 each.

The constables or head constables on the existing strength of traffic police in the five cities would be either sent to the regular police for law and order duty or to the highways because majority of them did not have BA degrees.

The supervisory staff of the existing traffic police in these cities like ASIs and SIs not having the BA degrees would also be sent either to the district police for law and order duty or to the highway traffic.

Sources said the new traffic police set-up in the five cities would be independent of the normal district police. And unlike the present practice, none from the district police would be transferred to the traffic police.

In future, the posts of the ASIs and SIs in the traffic police would be filled through promotions of the BA traffic officers who would wear a specially designed uniform and work in eight-hour shifts.

The transformed traffic policemen would be given 250cc motorcycles, pick-ups, speed guns and radars to control traffic. There would be centralized computer system to regulate their functioning and to control shortcomings in challans.

The traffic police are being modernized on the direction of the chief minister and the planning and development board has already asked them to furnish their area of beats so as to estimate the required equipment for them.