KOCHI: People tired of going 11 floors up to the City Police Commissioner’s office in Revenue Tower on Park Avenue Road can heave a sigh of relief. For, the office will soon be shifted to Marine Drive. The plan is to turn the DIG (Kochi range) office at Marine Drive into the City Police Commissionerate office. As for the DIG office, steps are on to shift it with the department considering to set up a new office at Kalamassery.
The top brass is citing operational convenience as the reason for the relocation of the commissioner’s office. However, there are rumours that the police headquarters took the decision as Kochi Commissioner Vijay S Sakhare had renovated the DIG office at Marine Drive, his working space while he was IG (Kochi Range).
However, he had to move out of the refurbished office and relocate to Revenue Tower when he was appointed the commissioner as per the government’s decision to make Kochi city a police commissionerate and reserve the commissioner post for an IG-rank officer. At present, S Kaliraj Mahesh Kumar is DIG (Kochi range).
“Though there have been some discussions regarding shifting the commissioner’s office to the DIG’s office at Marine Drive, I haven’t received any order in this regard,” Sakhare said. Besides deciding on making Kochi a commissionerate, the government had downgraded range IG postings in the state to the DIG rank, thereby relieving Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram cities from the jurisdictional control of the respective range IGs. Earlier, Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram cities were headed by a DIG-rank officer who reported to their respective IGs.
“However, with the government now downgrading the range IG post, range DIGs have no jurisdictional control over the two cities. Their task is to manage policing in rural areas,” said another senior officer.
The officer said there was nothing wrong in shifting the range DIG offices away from the city as they were now tasked with monitoring the rural police and other districts that were assigned to them.