Aurangabad: The introduction of the human resource management system (HRMS) in the police force in Osmanabad district has worked wonders in eliminating general duty at police stations and doubling the strength of cops on night duty, all with the existing manpower available.
The HRMS project was developed by M Ramesh, a 2017-batch IPS officer who applied management studies, concepts, and theories to address the issue of manpower crunch, under-utilisation of existing manpower, non-accountability of staff, vague tasking, excess workload on some, and less or no workload on others.
After observing positive results from the pilot project at Dhoki, a grade-C police station in the Kalamb sub-division, Aurangabad range’s special inspector general of police KM Mallikarjuna Prasanna implemented it at all the police stations in Osmanabad district. The project has yielded encouraging results, said Prasanna. “The modified scheme of HRMS was tested on a pilot basis in one of the police stations under Kalamb sub-division and the outcomes, observed over a short period of time from October to December 2022, revealed that there has been a positive improvement on almost all core parameters of functioning at the police station,” he added.
The district is the first in Maharashtra to do away with general duty at police stations, said an official.
The HRMS project focuses on equal sharing of workload among policemen, better accountability, and efficient monitoring, said superintendent of police Atul Kulkarni. As a first step, the system of general duty was eliminated and all staffers on duty were reassigned to beats. Beats were tasked to function full-fledged like a mini police station, which entailed looking after their jurisdiction in its entirety. Second officers were given the responsibility of monitoring the beats.
This was followed by profiling of duties and man hours of each staff, and a few men were assigned additional responsibilities, based on their availability and duty hours. The night patrol strength was almost doubled, and administrative staff were also tasked with night patrol.
These steps almost doubled the number of investigating officers, thus improving the quality of investigation. To ensure that the initiative is implemented in letter and spirit, a monthly monitoring proforma was designed for the station house officer (SHO) based on 11 core points of policing, with data extracted for the last two years of a particular month. Then the targets were set accordingly for the current month, the official said.
A weekly monitoring proforma was designed for each beat based on the same 11 core points. The performance was reviewed once a week by the in-charge officer and daily by the beat officer. A timesheet was made for each staff, taking their man-hours accountability every two hours, for an average of eight hours a day.
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