Police come up with mobile app to check violence during polls

JALANDHAR: Ahead of the Assembly polls which are being apprehended as being more violent this time, the Jalandhar Police Commissionerate has come up with a new mobile application, which is likely to be used across Punjab and even other states going to polls.

Deputy Commissioner KK Yadav shows the newly launched mobile app in Jalandhar. Tribune Photo: Malkiat Singh

Deepkamal Kaur

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, October 19

Ahead of the Assembly polls which are being apprehended as being more violent this time, the Jalandhar Police Commissionerate has come up with a new mobile application, which is likely to be used across Punjab and even other states going to polls.

The app has mapped all polling stations in the city with the police stations concerne, patrolling teams, flying squads and even the nearest naka points with the contact numbers of all officers for a quick response to any complaint received pertaining to law and order problem. Any complaint received would be automatically directed to by the police personnel at the spot within a minute or so while it will also be monitored in a centralised way. Since the application will have all the contacts, it can be used even for making direct calls.

“Named Bahattar Ghante (meaning 72 hours), the mobile application will be the most crucial in the last three main election days,” said Jalandhar Police Commissioner Arpit Shukla.

He said, “The AK Joti, Election Commissioner, ECI, had taken a prototype of the application from us when he was here last month. He really appreciated the working of the app and said that he would not just want it to be used in Punjab but also other states going for elections. He had proposed that we add in some more features into it which we have done. We demonstrated it to him during a video conferencing yesterday and he is now fully convinced. We have given copies of it to some officials and have already begun trials on it.”

Shukla said the copies of the mobile app would be made available to leaders of all political parties and all voters in the region ahead of the elections. “As and when we will get the list of the officers on duty, we will feed their contacts into it. Till the last polls, the reaction time was a bit slow as we first used to understand the location of the crime, check for the contact of the concerned ilaqa magistrate and then forward the complaint to it, it won’t be so this time,” said ADCP Amneet Kondal, who has worked on developing the application.