Though the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) led federal and provincial governments have almost completed its tenure, a total of 101 police stations of the city remain without computerised system and the plan to make all the police station online remained incomplete during the five year tenure, it has been learnt.
In some cases, the Station House Officers (SHOs) have been provided with branded Pentium-IV computers and printers, however the majority of stations remained either without computers or the computers have remained in a dysfunctional state for long.
Sources told Pakistan Today that some 60 to 70 police stations have been provided with computers that were supposed to be connected with the centralized data centre, established at the Central Police Officer (CPO) of the metropolitan.
Definitely, the pace on the project of computerisation of the police stations was very fast and the entire process would be completed within 60 days, an official privy to the development and requesting anonymity, told Pakistan Today.
The project was kicked off in January 2008 with a total cost of Rs 941 million and it was to be completed within a time duration of five years, however the project was ignored completely by the higher authorities.
The project included; connecting all police stations of Sindh with the central data centre at CPO, Sindh police portal and website emailing system for Sindh police, police vehicle management system GIS-based monitoring, FM police radio channel, surveillance system with recording on traffic sections, e-Driving license system with violation management system (traffic management system), e-Ticketing/e-Challan, driving license issuance, interconnectivity of driving license branches, interconnectivity of traffic sections), prisoner registration, record and movement system, PRRMS video conferencing system between central prison and high court data centre and providing networking infrastructure, hardware and their connectivity at 500 locations all over the Sindh province, including all PS, DPO and RPO offices.
The sources further said there were some 500 police stations in the province, and out of them 101fell in the Karachi region, 184 in Hyderabad and 215 in Sukkur region. The computerisation work on the police stations of Hyderabad and Sukkur regions were also taking place on a very slow pace.
Once completed, it would enhance performance of the police department specifically during registration of FIRs, probing of crime, addressing of public complaints and other such matters.
Each SHO was supposed to receive a latest computer with a printer and an Internet connection and they were to receive computer training in the first phase, but the plan seemed to be going nowhere, the sources added.
The years old manual work at the police stations was to be changed with the introduction of computers. In addition, complaints and FIRs lodged with various police stations would be uploaded to a databank that could be accessed by high ups like IGP, DIGs, RPOs and DPOs.
Furthermore, sources said the manual system of issuing challan receipts to the violators of traffic rules and regulations would be replaced with computerized system. In this system, the traffic police were to be provided with the Personal Digital Assistance Machine (machine-readable license) and the officials would have been able to issue a computerised receipt.
Under the said plan, the originality of the licenses was to be checked and the citizens could check their driving license at the traffic sections of the metropolis. In addition to this, IP-based (Internet Protocol) surveillance cameras would also be installed at different traffic sections including Nipa Chowrangi, Hasan Square, Kharadar and other areas of the city for proper monitoring of traffic while keeping an eye on the performance of the cops.
