Advocating the issuance of more powers to the lower rung of police, Cricketer Venkatesh Prasad on Saturday stated that the job of the police was easy to criticise from outside but a tough one to implement.
“It is like cricket, only the people in the field know what the real scenario is,” he said. Prasad was speaking at the Citizens Forum meeting of the Traffic Advisory Committee of the Bangalore Traffic Police at New Horizon School
in Indiranagar.
Started about four months ago, this initiative saw participation in large numbers on Saturday as more than thirty people got a chance to voice their problems in front of police officials like Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) M A Saleem, ACP Traffic East Venkataswamy and Indiranagar Traffic Inspector MC Kavitha who gave them a patient listening. From issues like parking woes on CMH road to scientific explanations for removing medians, the citizens came prepared to list out all the issues faced by them in a locality which used to be a silent residential zone and has now grown into one of the city’s rapidly growing commercial areas. “A lot of people cut across Defence Colony due to jams on 6th main road. There are a lot of elderly people living here and chain snatching incidents have also gone up,” said Prasad who advocated giving the lower rungs of police more teeth to nab traffic violators.
The Principal of New Horizon School stated that the school children were facing many problems with the issue of loud horns inspite of the school being a horn free zone. The citizens also claimed that the Tin Factory bus stop was used by private vehicles to pick up passengers instead of being used by the
BMTC to park their buses.
They also stated that harsher punishments were needed since people today had gotten used to abusing the traffic police. “I am 72-years-old and I had to sell my car as I just dont feel safe driving it anymore. Also, earlier footpaths were given steps to access which used to keep the two wheelers off them. Nowadays it has shifted to the slope system which is wrong,” said Lakshman Rao, President of Residents Welfare Association,
HAL II Stage. Explaining the reason behind the initiative Dr MA Saleem said, “The traffic police deals with the public and not inanimate objects like roads and flyovers. In such a situation, feedback becomes necessary.” He added that for BTP the problem areas were the road between NGEF and HAL Gate and stated that the other problems like honking have been ingrained
into our culture.
“Residents who sold their properties to commercial companies once the road (100 ft road) was widened invited the shops and showrooms into the area. They are the ones to be blamed,” he said. Dr Saleem also went on to list various other initiatives by the Traffic police to curb traffic violations and requested the schools in the area to adopt the Safe Route To School System.
He also directed the area police to keep shifting checkposts for drunken driving in order to curb the menace more effectively.