A few days after assuming charge as the Director General of Police Uttarakhand, Anil Kumar Raturi made it clear while talking to The Pioneer on Wednesday that he is against replacing revenue police with regular police unless the people living under the jurisdiction of the former want it collectively. “What I feel is that the highlanders are still viewing regular police with a kind of fear. As long as such fear persists we would not shove regular police on them. However, we would of course intervene when the crime rate sees a significant surge in these areas,” he said.
However, at the same time, he said that the situation in the hills of the State has seen a massive change since the time the British regime introduced the revenue police system. “Earlier, connectivity in those areas was abysmally poor with the non-existence of roads. Now, with the improvement in the infrastructure, volume of crime is also going up. Cyber crimes are finding their ways into the hills in the present time. Objective conditions are thus ripe for replacement of revenue police with regular police. But we would not thrust regular police on the hill people unless a strong consensus evolves for that,” he said.
Spelling out his priority, the State police chief said that he would go all-out to bring about an image- makeover in the police department. “We must be polite while dealing with the people. They must be made to consider us as their friends, out to redress their grievances at the earliest. We must hear them out patiently and take actions on their complaints swiftly,” he said.
Quizzed over the Maoists continuing with their postering and graffiti campaign in several places in Almora, Nainital and Bageshwar districts, Raturi said that the problem of such ultra left extremism is now on the wane after police came down heavily on them by dismantling their training camps in Nainital district. “Many of them were arrested too. However, we are not playing down the menace. We are alert and are on the lookout for them. Whatever is left of the menace would be eliminated soon,” DGP assured.