Paucity of funds has hit Delhi Police’s ambitious project ‘Hamari Police Hamare Mohalle’ application-cum-web-based portal. Money crunch has tied the hands of the force as it is finding it extremely difficult to run the project. This has also resulted in the force almost shelving expansion to other parts of the national Capital. The total budget for this project has been pegged at Rs6.77 crore. Senior officers handling this project said they are exploring ways and means to fund it as the project will help the beat police personnel in coordination.
The execution of the project, seemingly a difficult puzzle, is facing financial trouble as the project in itself pulls a hefty expenditure to bring in action its prerequisites — android based smart devices for beat officers, SIM cards, desktops, printers, training and handholding, software and cloud telephony exchange. The figures say that the total expenditure estimated by Delhi police in carrying this project amounts to Rs6.77 crore including software budget of Rs60 lakh, handholding budget of Rs1.28 crore, total devices and sim charges budget of Rs4.42 crore and total cloud telephony exchange budget of Rs46.56 lakh.
The Delhi police has put forward its financial inferences in which they have presented that for the launch of the application and the web portal, factors, involving beat officers per police stations, resource persons to train them for three years, 43 services that the app encapsulates and cloud telephone technology being used, cost a large amount which for now is acting as a hindrance.
To elaborate, it has been told that for the project to run as smooth as it is thought to be, 10 beat officers have to appointed the duty each for 181 police stations and further these police stations have to be divided into five divisions for better efficiency.
As the project includes both citizen portal and police portal covering 43 different services, the budget soars with that. The Delhi Police, for a better understanding has also broken the budget into sub-categories to indicate financial implications in a simpler way.
According to their budget-breakup, the Delhi Police has estimated Rs50 lakh for citizen and police software portal, Rs92.4 lakh for training, handholding and onsite support and Rs36 lakh for a project manager under handholding department. The Delhi Police said they need 2700 mobile devices that will cost them around Rs2.16 crore excluding Rs2.26 crore that they have approximated for their data charges. The project that will run on cloud telephony exchange is said to cost them Rs3.36 lakh for PRI line rental and Rs43.2 lakh for call forwarding charges.
Till now the application, that is said to maximise the interface between police and public through an allotment of beat officers in every district with a click-away technology, has only been run on trial in the capital’s East and South East districts for past six months. As an effect, 600 beat officers and 50 citizens had participated in it and 1000 downloads of the application from Google play store took place. According to the figures, around 1.93 lakh records were created during this pilot project including 34625 tenant verifications, 63706 stranger roll mentioned, 15980 criminal databank, 26194 entries in ‘pehchan vulnerable children’ and etc.
Just to note that the project, an amalgamation of more than 40 different kinds of applications and their interfaces and interlinks, was mentioned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in DG-IG conference in 2014 under the banner of his m-governance vision. He had then mentioned that the project will enhance the capacity of constable and would link and use the strengths of law abiding citizen community. As a matter of fact the project aims to help public, report incidents only by sitting at home in order to save their visit to police stations. The project aims to include services for senior citizens, women staying alone, tenant verifications, servant-requests, search for missing children, stolen vehicles and more.
