June 09, 2008	Monday	Jamadi-us-Sani 04, 1429

KARACHI, June 8: The government, in an attempt to enhance the efficiency of the law-enforcers in the province, has approved an e-policing project costing Rs940 million.

The project envisages integrated links between courts and police stations and the establishment of call centres for rescue service.

The Sindh IT ministry had already sent an initial plan of the project to the centre and with the release of funds, the project would be subsequently implemented in three years, said sources in the Sindh police.

“The plan has been chalked out after months of deliberations considering several proposals received by the provincial ministry,” said a senior official.

He hoped that the implementation of the project would help enhance the performance of the police department and the crime rate would be controlled.

The official said that initially, it had been proposed to focus only on the Karachi police but later, Hyderabad and Sukkur were also included and it was decided to implement the project in the entire province.

“Under the e-policing project, Madadgar ‘15’ call centres having a strength of 100 men in Karachi and 15 more in Hyderabad and Sukkur regions will be established,” said the official.

He said that apart from these call centres, a link between the courts and the police stations would be established for swift access to the database ensuring maximum accuracy in the records. However, he said, the success of the project depended much on skilled workforce, which would handle the high-tech system.

For that purpose, the official added, computer training courses for policemen had also been planned, which would be started in the first phase of the project.He said that the proposed e-policing project would handle issues like traffic management, call centres for rescue service, video conferencing system, software development and automation of the prison department.

“The project aims at streamlining a number of in-house tasks of the police department, which includes documentation of the department and computerisation of the entire organisational process and its records,” he said.Envisaged more than three years ago the project failed to take off despite several announcements made by the relevant authorities. Though the new provincial set-up has succeeded in getting funds for the project approved, it has yet to announce the timeframe to formally initiate and complete the project.

The authorities claim that the e-policing project in Sindh would be implemented on the pattern in place in various developed countries, but it requires efforts from all the quarters concerned.

“There is a proposal that initially, a few police stations will be interconnected in the first phase and gradually more police stations from the interior parts of the province will be brought into this system. In the third and final phase, all the police stations across the province of Sindh will be linked to this system,” he added.

He said that traffic management was also part of the planned project.