Cop-ing with trouble: A policeman dies every 48 hrs

[sidmis]

Mumbai: The Mumbai Police are increasingly losing officers to work and stress related diseases. The statistics are shocking – one policeman dies every 48 hours.

“There is no time to eat and then there are times when we just have a cup of tea at meal times. That's one reason why we are falling ill,” an ailing policeman, Ashok More said.

Fifty-one-year-old More, a police hawaldar, has been in the hospital for the last 15 days. A diabetes patient for the last seven years, he is simply unable to do the strenuous work that is expected of a Mumbai policeman.

"The long hours of standing in the sun make one's head spin," Ashok said.

Ashok's is not an isolated case. On an average a Mumbai policeman spends 15 to 16 hours at work every day and till recently, a weekly off was an almost unheard of concept.

Reacting to the issue Joint Commissioner Administration, Hemant Karkare said, "We have just started to give them weekly offs."

It took a concerned citizen, Chetan Kothari, to get information through the Right To Information Act, which revealed that a Mumbai policeman was dying in harness every 48 hours.

In the last five years, 920 policemen have died. Almost 160 policemen have died every year since 2002 and the main cause of death is stress, chronic ailments like cardiac problems and diabetes, accidents while at work and suicides.

"We get 250-300 policemen as OPD patients everyday with all kinds of ailments,” Nagpada Police Hospital in-charge, Dr S M Patil said.

However, there could be some hope for the ailing policemen. “Looking at their adverse working condition, I thought I would try to find the exact details and I intend to file a PIL for their benefit,” Chetan Kothari said.

All is not well in the 40,000-odd Mumbai Police force and perhaps this is the story across the country. The men in khakhi, who are entrusted with the responsibility of protecting us, are themselves physically weak and morally shaken.


Kanhaiya Singh / CNN-IBN
November 01, 2007
Cop-ing with trouble: A policeman dies every 48 hrs