Circa 1989 (Behind City Police HQ, Crawford Market, Mumbai): Waves of fetid squalor steamed out, piercing the nostrils. Gashes of light glistened on the puddles and congealed blue vapour crawled along the peeled cement of walls housing sodden, skeletal rooms with families of police constables. People hopped on the muck filled paths seeping with rancid gutter black liquid froth, and children played near these over-ground trenches amidst the shying skein of sunlight jostling with darkness on the doors looking like eyeless sockets. The scene was straight out of a kitchen sink literature.
The facade of the buildings were being white-washed to cover the tenebrous darkness and musty interiors that simmered with heat like a steady plasma torch. The reason: It was the quasquicentennial year for Mumbai (then Bombay) Police Commissionerate. And the President of India was to be the chief guest for the occasion.
May 4, 2106 (Chandivli, in North East Mumbai): The burning sun sizzles on the grey asphalt roads and the hot air makes the eyes water. Life pulsates on the roads even as the garbage stench battles with the creeping auto rickshaw smoke flickering dust on people’s slippers and on the millions of sweat drops that trickle down silently from foreheads.
The name-plates announcing the low-ceilinged water-soaked entrances to police constabulary residential quarters hang elliptically with alphabet and building numbers cowering in the dark, smoky splotches. An ectoplasmic darkness envelopes the empty ground floor rooms looking like gaping mouths of scorched skulls. The buildings jostle with each other in scorching pain as empty eyes look up and weak susurrations of light tip-toe on cat’s paws while entering the floors in these housing tenements.
Inside the bowels of most of these houses, the sun hardly peeps in and once out on the lane, the sun explodes into the eyes like phosphorous on a dry bone in a graveyard.
The terrible stillness of stagnation
Twenty-seven years have elapsed and the darkness at noon refuses to wither away, and the police constable continues to live with hope that has become an abscess trickling inside the innards of his mind. Nothing has changed for a Constable or even a Sub-Inspector in India; neither in the ‘Maximum City’ Mumbai, nor in the dusty, ridged pock-marked roads of the hinterlands.
An officer holding a rank of an Inspector (attached to a police station in a North-East suburb of Mumbai), who has worked in all the branches of police including the establishment and buildings department, speaking on the condition of anonymity, asks: “Why do news reporters go and talk about our housing problems to ministers or IPS (Indian Police Service) officers? I really fail to comprehend as to how you will gain insight into the issues that plague us day and night? Ministers and IPS officers live in a different world…they live in stratosphere…not here on the mean streets…they are the gentry class who do not even have a modicum of empathy for the plight of the lower ranks.”
Another officer interjects and says: “Two or three years ago, a high-ranking IPS officer from Mumbai Police Commissionerate desperately tried to usurp a plot of land earmarked for police constabulary and junior officer family quarters. The plot was near the Worli sea-side and since the mid-eighties, politicians, IAS (Indian Administrative Service), IPS and other high ranking government officials, both serving and retired, have been eyeing this coveted sea-side ribbon. “Politicians and several sports personalities and retired IAS and IPS officials over time have managed to slice off a major chunk of the land that was reserved for police constabulary to construct houses for themselves….they all want to enjoy the sea-breeze in their twilight years, after all, they have spent all their working hours in air-conditioned offices and cars.”
The IPS lobby, in face of massive protests and fear of being exposed after a lot of haranguing and berating the silently fuming constabulary, withdrew these plans.
However, the buck does not stop at just one place. According to a Head Constable, most of the police colonies or tenements provided to the constabulary or even lower-ranking police officers (Sub-Inspectors, Assistant Sub-Inspectors et al.) date back to the 1940s and 1950s. “These buildings do not even have proper power or water supply…they are like cattle sheds where our families share rooms with roaches and rats and spiders and dead birds. Come and see the way we live in Marol police colony and you will realise…or take a tour of police quarters at Wadi Bunder (South Mumbai) and you will see what it means to live in a place where even a slum dweller will shy away if given a chance to take up lodgings…they are like tombs.”
But according to the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D) the level of satisfaction for family housing quarters for constabulary has gone up at the national level. Most constables concurred with the findings on grounds that the satisfaction graph put up by BPRD, stems from the fact that at the constabulary level most recruits hail from the working class and lower income strata. “Check out any Constable’s antecedents and you will find that they had spent their early lives slumming from one hovel to another…studying under a street lamp. Thus gaining an entry into a government service and then getting a concrete roof to live certainly comes as a respite to a youngster who has spent all his teenage years living in a house like a patchwork box of rags perched near gutter water. But then how many Constables manage to get family housing quarters?” they ask.
As per the Mumbai Police Commissionerate records put up on its official website, at present the total strength from inspector level to constabulary is 46,299. And out of this not more than 20 per cent manage to get a family housing quarters in the island city or suburbs. The rest have to ferret out cheap rental houses outside the periphery of city.
“So what we see in almost all police stations is that a police Sub-Inspector or a Constable spending around two to three hours travelling from the place of residence to the assigned police station. And it is a common sight in almost all police stations to see Sub-Inspectors and Constables packing their lunch boxes by 4.30 pm …showing total disinterestedness towards people who troop in with their complaints…the travelling takes a toll and it shows in the fatigue that engulfs him or her by late noon…and just thinking of the two-hour return journey in a packed train is enough to infuse indifference in any human being,” the Inspector from the North East suburb of Mumbai, remarks.
The mandarins sitting in Mantralaya and Sachivalaya, however, hold different views and most policy makers in Maharashtra even brought down the housing expenditure for state police from Rs. 25,481.60 (2013-14) to Rs. 19,164.72 (2014-15). (Rs.in crores, citation: BPR&D official site: https://www.bprd.nic.in)
The oft cited reason by the policy makers, law makers and top-ranking IPS officials of not being able to provide adequate family residential quarters because there is a paucity of land does not find any takers amongst the police personnel.
They aver that the reason behind turning a blind eye to the police housing lies in the twisted priorities, coupled with an inclination towards doling out land to big land predators in the name of ‘development’ and industrialisation. “And wherever they acquire land…you find either there is a shoddy construction or the work moving at a snail’s pace,” the Head Constable observes.
In January this year, a PIL was heard by the Bombay High Court with regard to the collection of nearly Rs. 84 crore from around 7,000 constables to provide them with houses in Panvel (outside Mumbai). The court issued a notice to the Director General of Police (Housing) and ordered a probe. The probe continues and so does the darkness at noon.