BENGALURU: THIS New Year’s Eve, if you are planning to spend time in the MG Road- Brigade Road area or anywhere in the city centre, just keep a little of your senses untouched by alcohol to ensure proper behaviour. Because, in all probability, the stranger next to you posing as a reveller, could be a cop in mufti keeping a tight vigil to ensure nothing goes wrong the way it did last year.
This is part of elaborate plans of the city police who are planning police presence on MG Road-Brigade with a cop-to-revellers ratio of 1:17. In all, 2,000 police personnel, including 500 women personnel, will be in the central business district City Police Commissioner T Suneel Kumar on Wednesday said that besides this, camera-fitted drones and watchtowers with armed policemen would help the force keep an eagle’s eye on the happenings around in this area. The drones will be used in specific places on MG Road and Brigade Road. As the TenderSure road works on Church Street are in progress, there will be certain restrictions there too, Kumar said.
An undisclosed number of intelligence sleuths and police in plainclothes (mufti) will mingle with the revellers -- each passing off as one among them -- to ensure close-quarter watch to ensure safety of women and prevent anti-social elements from taking advantage of large crowds of up to 35,000 who are expected to converge on MG Road-Brigade Road- Church Street area on December 31 night. The floating population -- people who would just come and go to other areas -- is expected to be about 5,000 in this area on that night. This is the first time in the history of Bengaluru City that such a huge police deployment is on the cards in a single area of CBD.