KARACHI: In a move to keep an eye on the movement of official cars and mobile vans of police across the province so that they are not misused, the Sindh police have decided to bring a fleet of more than 4,000 vehicles under a tracking system, it emerged on Sunday.

A tender seeking bid proposals from different car tracking companies for this project has recently been issued, said an official, adding that the initiative was part of the plan for making use of technological support in regular policing and management at the institutional level.

He said: “The project is named vehicle tracking services for monitoring of Sindh police vehicles.”

“There are more than 4,000 vehicles across the province in the Sindh police’s fleet which are planned to be equipped with the tracking system. The range of these vehicles include cars, police mobiles, vans and buses as well.”

He said the idea to put these vehicles’ movement under surveillance was not a new one but “unfortunately” it had never been pursued seriously with the result that the project had never materialized. This time, he said, the authorities seemed more serious and the recent tender on these lines reflected that they wanted the system in place within next two months.

“The companies that would be selected after a formal process would be responsible to equip the 4,000 vehicles with tracking device within a certain stipulated time,” he said.

“Once the installation is done, the company will set up and operate a monitoring and surveillance centre in the police headquarters. The company will also operate it from its own facility.”

Apart from other reasons and technical upgrade at the institutional management level, the authorities admitted that the move was mainly aimed at checking misuse of the police vehicles that are often seen serving personal purposes of senior officers and sometimes at the lower cadre as well.

They argued that such practices not only affected the performance of the law-enforcement agency but also consumed funds set aside for police. Shortage of fuel funds before the end of every financial year had always been a key issue for the law-enforcement agency, they said.

“We often receive complaints from police stations and also from senior officers about shortage of fuel budget,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a genuine complaint but most of the time it has been noted that the quota of fuel allocated to certain police stations, different units and officers is consumed due to the personal use of the official vehicles rather than public duties.”

Similarly, he said, the Sindh police always owed a big amount of money to the oil companies that supplied fuel to the law-enforcement agency more than what had been originally allocated for the vehicles due to overconsumption of fuel. This ultimately affected the budget every year, he added.

In the current financial year, the Sindh government has allocated Rs82.3 billion for law and order covering police, jails, the Pakistan Rangers, Sindh, and other security agencies. In the financial year 2015-16, it had set aside Rs64.458 billion which was an increase of 10 per cent from the outgoing financial year.

Published in Dawn February 6th, 2017