Ardh Kumbh police duty points being identified

Sandeep Rawat

Tribune News Service

Haridwar, September 3

The process of earmarking duty points for the Ardh Kumbh fair for more than 5,000 mela force personnel has started with the formation of a six-member committee.

This committee will do field inspection, analyse sensitive, and important points and also finalise the number of police personnel and paramilitary forces to be assigned duty points in the mela zone.

The committee comprises traffic inspector Prabodh Ghildiyal, sub in charge Manoj Singh Negi, Ajit Singh, Harish Bijalwan and Pankaj Shah.

All these committee personnel have experience of Maha Kumbh, Kanwar yatra, Ganga Dussehra, Somwati Amawasya, Baisakhi, Makar Sankranti and Buddh Poornima among other festivals.

DIG, Ardh Kumbh fair, Ganesh Singh Martolia said the committee had been assigned important duty of identifying duty points.

Various factors such as strategic location, distance from Brahma Kund, Har-ki-Pauri, important places such as railway station, bus station, main intersections, chowks and markets are considered.

Besides, duty points are created in such a way that crowd could be managed from one location itself and route diversion could be done in a short time by police personnel from the duty points.

The committee members will daily survey and inspect the mela zone and report to the DIG about their assessment of the situation. However, a high-powered committee comprising DIG Martolia, the SSP, the SP, Ardh Kumbh Mela, SP, Traffic, IG Garhwal division and the Haridwar SSP.

Haridwar Roorkee Development Authority secretary Nidhi Yadav, SP Traffic, Ardh Kumbh, Shweta Chaubey, HRDA executive engineer Navin Kumar, Gobind Singh, Prabodh Ghildiyal and other officials of government departments and nodal agencies gave their views to the six-member committee.