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1,500 excess police personnel in Nagaland

By Bhadra Gogoi

DIMAPUR, Nov 29 - Nagaland police has an excess of around 1,500 uniformed personnel making the State Government bear an extra burden of Rs 50 crore annually for payment of their salaries. This was disclosed by IGP (Crime) Toshitsungba Aier during the Nagaland Police Service Association annual conference at Police Complex, Chumukedima on Thursday.

Aier said the Police department has become an �employment department� with 23 per cent of the State Budget (Non-Plan) being spent on 26,000 police force in the State.

Lamenting that the excessive appointment is a �huge burden� on the State Government, the IGP said the ratio of police and public has gone up to 1:50 against the national average of 1:500.

Despite huge deployment of uniformed personnel, performance on investigation and detection of crime was not up to the mark, he rued. Aier attributed this to the government spending more on resource and energy for non-policing and giving less importance to crime and investigation.

He advocated �open recruitment� in police department so that performance of uniformed personnel could be improved.

It may be mentioned that the alleged backdoor appointments in the Home department was brought to light recently by Nagaland Pradesh Congress Committee (NPCC) and Chakhesang Students Union(CSU) through RTIs. It was alleged that the department had appointed around 3,900 individuals through backdoor. A PIL was also filed by the CSU recently.

Comparing the performance of State police personnel to Indian Reserve police personnel, Aier said the latter perform better since 60 to 70 per cent of them were appointed on merit.

He also cited misuse in out of turn promotion among the officers through various factors and �commission� by unit commanders as one of the factors leading to demoralisation among its personnel.

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