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For a police station in New Delhi to be named Asia’s best — by a global organisation — is an unusual surprise. Barakhamba Road (BKR) police station, tucked behind Hotel Lalit and near the cultural hub at Mandi House, accomplished just that when it won the award given by Altus Global, an association of NGOs. The man behind this feat now sits in a police station in North Rohini. Station House Officer (SHO) Satish Sharma was, till March this year, the SHO at BKR police station. Before BKR, he was the SHO at Chanakyapuri police station, with a total experience of 24 years under his belt. He agrees to speak on the subject of the award, but only reluctantly. “You should speak to the current SHO there, or our ACP sahib,” says Sharma.
When he finally relents, the 48-year-old Sharma is the perfect host. Over glasses of chilled water and an orange drink and juggling calls on his two Nokia mobile phones, he explains what sets the BKR station apart. “If you’ve seen the building, I can bet that you thought it wasn’t a police station,” he says. The 14-floor building (with three floors for parking), spread over 13,500 sq feet, bears the façade of a museum or cultural space with its mosaic tiles. “When the building was inaugurated in mid-2013, we kept the sign board to a minimal size so that people wouldn’t feel intimidated,” Sharma adds. The building has a lift and is friendly for differently-abled visitors. All offices and rooms, including the ones used for interrogation, are air-conditioned. The women’s helpdesk has a woman officer. She refuses to let me go to the ACP’s office alone. “There are barracks upstairs, so women are not supposed to go alone,” she explains. ACP Pawan Kumar is proud of the station’s achievement, and appears to want to focus more on the overall infrastructure than Sharma’s contributions.
In North Rohini, a woman officer sits at the front-desk, but the women’s helpdesk is unmanned. While the BKR police station instils confidence and puts one at ease, the one in North Rohini, like most local police stations in the city, makes one feel like an accused. Sharma now sits in an office half the size of the one at BKR. He switches from Hindi to English with ease, with a certain refinement in his speech. “Infrastructure is one thing, and you can only work with the space you are given. But the gentry there was different — it was easier to resolve conflicts,” he says. It seems then that the police station won the award for its interaction criteria and infrastructure rather than its successful outcomes or crime-solving prowess. “I used to open my laptop and show people the law to help them understand. I miss that here,” Sharma rues. “Infrastructure is gradually getting better at most stations. But what needs to change is the tenor of interaction between the public and the police,” says Sharma.
The first point of contact for visitors at a police station are the sub-inspectors manning the front-desks. For this award, volunteers asked visitors to rate their experience based on their interaction with the officers. BKR scored high on that parameter. Sharma and the current SHO at BKR, Swadesh Sharma, both insist that they hold regular briefings with their staff about how to interact with the public, which seems to be his role in the police station’s success story too. “I always believe that officers should remember how they don’t want to be spoken to,” says Sharma. “When a mother wants her child to do something, she points to a policeman to instil fear. This needs to change,” he says. So what does he miss the most from his days in BKR? The answer comes promptly. “I miss the broad roads, and of course, this kind of interaction with the media.”
