LAHORE: Addressing the decades-old issue of non-registration of public complaints, the Punjab police department has integrated the 15 calls with the police station record management system (PSRMS).

IGP Inam Ghani on Tuesday inaugurated the innovative scheme to ensure 100pc free registration of cases in all the police stations of the province. Senior police officers attended the inaugural ceremony which was arranged to highlight the salient features of the initiative.

“The IGP Punjab has inaugurated an intervention which will convert the 15 call units into a written entry in real time in the daily diary,” Punjab DIG Operations Sohail Akhtar Sukhera said. He, along with Punjab DIG Information and Technology (IT) Waqas Nazir, spoke to media to explain the benefits of the new system/scheme for the common citizens. He said the initiative was a continuity of chain of police reforms Mr Ghani had introduced since he assumed charge of the IGP.

“We have witnessed a chain of applications to provide common man hassle-free system and they can get information just by pushing a button,” the DIG said.

He said the intervention would help register the complaint of an individual and if there is a crime related to loss of property and is not nominating anyone, then the FIR would be lodged within 24 hours.

“This will certainly ensure free registration curbing the general pretexts of the responders,” Mr Sukhera said.

The DIG said the police officials concerned employed delaying tactics or gave lame excuses and misled their bosses about the 15 complaints of the citizens by saying the mobile phone of caller is off, the caller is not responding and so on and so forth. He said that under the new scheme, if they are not lodging the FIR, the officers will have to pen down or furnish logical reasons to file the application.

The DIG said that under the previous faulty mechanism, more than 62pc of the complaints were not registered. But now, he said, each 15 call would automatically be registered with the police station concerned and the caller would get an auto-generated text on his mobile phone. On non-registration of his first information report within 24 hours of the call, the circle officer, district police officer and city police officer would get an alert from the system.

That means, all the supervisory officers would be updated every moment about the non-registration of the FIR and this system would help minimise the chances of non-registration of complaints of the 15 callers, said the DIG.

Mr Sukhera declared the IGP’s newly-introduced system to integrate the 15 calls with the PSRMS a game-changer to address decades-old genuine grievance of a common citizen of non-registration of FIR.

The DIG IT said the second step was also definitely a revolutionary one according to which any individual could submit his/her application to any Khidmat Markaz without visiting the police station.

“The salient feature of this novel scheme is that an aggrieved person can even submit his written complaint in any Khidmat Markaz of his area regardless of whether the Markaz is located in or out of geographical jurisdiction of the police station concerned,” Mr Nazir said. He further said that one could get his application filed even from a Khidmat Markaz situated in another city. This could encourage every segment of society particularly the women and the elderly persons who avoid the trouble of travelling to submit their applications.

“It is widely appreciated that the current police leadership is trying not only to improve police image but also to introduce practical reforms by minimising all sorts of irritants,” the DIG said.

Talking about the significance of the Khidmat Markaz, he said these facilities across the province resolved issues of 590,000 citizens last year. He said more such steps were under way to reform the investigation wing too and hoped that in near future the Punjab police would be leading the other provinces in introducing the latest and modern system in the best interest of public.

Published in Dawn, March 17th, 2021