In spite of facing several untoward incidents in recent years, neither the Ranchi Municipal Corporation (RMC) nor the police seems conscious about the security arrangements at the girls’ hostels operating recklessly at every nook of the Capital City.
The recent incident at a private lodge operating in Chutia has again sparked off the controversy regarding the safety of female hostellers where a group of boys created commotion and manhandled a few girls.
Though, the Ranchi Police acting swiftly have arrested all the accused involved in the case, no concrete measures have been adopted by the police department to curb such incidents.
Infringing the guidelines formulated recently to prevent the troublesome events inside the girls’ hostels considering regular occurrence of ruckus and entry of outsiders during late night hours, the Civic Body personnel have failed in conducting regular inspection. The Municipal Corporation, which has the responsibility of both formulating and implementing the norms regarding the private lodges’ operation, at present, is resting idle.
According to the rules chalked out by the RMC from the lodge security perspective, it is mandatory to install CCTV cameras, deploy at least one bodyguard considering the strength of the lodge, mount fire extinguishers. Inspection by the RMC personnel on every 15-day was one major component of the draft compiled for safety purposes.Also, registration of every lodge with the Civic Body, irrespective of the carpet area size, total bed capacity has been made mandatory for the owners or the care takers. All major details must be submitted to the Civic Body for future reference but the regulation formulated for ensuring smooth operation of lodges here is merely restricted on the papers.
“The major problem here is that no meeting regarding the registration of lodges considering all aspects has been conducted for past three months. Moreover, due to human resource crunch as well, we are unable to conduct checking drives at a regular interval as decided earlier. The condition now is such that we are not able to scrutinize the registration application forms that are lying in the office,” said Deputy Mayor Sanjiv Vijayawargia.
Ironically, even the Ranchi Police personnel are simply trying to eyewash the safety issue at private hostels as even after receiving instructions, database of all the hostels falling in different jurisdictions are yet to be prepared by the Officer-in-Charges (OCs) of respective police stations. “Through tiger vans, PCR vans frequent monitoring is being done. All the OCs have been asked to submit the list of lodges, hostels functioning in their jurisdiction,” said Sadar DSP and Ranchi Police Spokesperson Vikash Chandra Srivastava.