Traffic policemen make our roads safer but who will keep them safe?

Manoj Kumar, a constable with the Delhi Traffic Police, has to go to the hospital twice every month. He has a chest condition that leaves him gasping for breath at times.

It hasn't been caused by the Capital’s polluted air. "No, in my case, it was the mob attack,” he said.

The 26-year-old policeman and a colleague, Head Constable Jai Bhagwan, were assaulted by two motorcyclists and their relatives in the Gokulpuri area of northeast Delhi in July last year. They had stopped the bikers and given them a challan for driving without helmets and on the wrong side of a one-way road. The men also didn’t have driving licences.

“They refused to pay the fine and, instead, pulled out their phones and started making calls,” Jai Bhagwan, 53, said. “Five minutes later, I was surrounded by at least 20 men who pinned me down and started beating me with sticks.”

When Kumar went to Jai Bhagwan’s aid, he was beaten up too. Both had to be hospitalised. Jai Bhagwan was discharged a day later but Kumar suffered injuries to his diaphragm and chest muscles and was in hospital for four days.

Beaten to death for doing his job

This is not an isolated case. In recent months, traffic policemen across the country have found themselves increasingly vulnerable to attacks by errant motorists.

Over the past fortnight, there have been reports of at least three other attacks on traffic policemen in various cities.

On August 31, Vilas Shinde, a 50-year-old traffic constable in Mumbai’s Khar area, died, eight days after a 21-year-old man hit him on the head with a stick. Shinde had stopped the man’s 17-year-old brother for riding a bike without a helmet.

In June, Head Constable Hari Kishan was dragged 500 meters by a truck he had stopped at a check point in southeast Delhi’s Kalkaji. He held on to the footboard till other policemen stopped the speeding vehicle. He suffered serious injuries to his hands and knees.

“Some months before I was posted there, a traffic violator driving an SUV had tried to run over a sub-inspector,” the 28-year-old Kishan said.

It isn’t just Delhi or Mumbai. In May, there were three assaults on policemen in Kolkata. In April, the Hindu reported that a group of army men beat up two traffic officials in Bengaluru over a rule violation.

Call for action

In the wake of Shinde’s death, a delegation of wives of Mumbai Police personnel met Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena leader Raj Thackeray on Saturday, and Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray on Sunday, demanding urgent action.

In light of these attacks across the country, senior police officials have started taking steps to protect their men on traffic duty.

Mumbai police spokesperson Ashok Dudhe said a plan was in the works to deploy policemen in groups, so that “no traffic police official confronting an offender will be alone”. He, however, admitted such a plan will be tough to execute with the traffic department's strength of 3,500 personnel.

Meanwhile, Delhi – which has 5,000 traffic police personnel and follows a group deployment system – has equipped some of its men with body cameras. These small cameras can be pinned to the shirt and record audio and video evidence.

“After the growing number of attacks, we have given some of our men body cameras,” said Special Commissioner of Delhi Police (Traffic) Sandeep Goel. “So far, we are doing this on a pilot basis with 200 officials deployed in strategic locations. The results have been encouraging.”

Goel said the cameras not only increased the probability of arrest of traffic violators but also ensured the men wearing them worked efficiently.

The Hyderabad Police had introduced these cameras for their traffic officials in August last year.

In Delhi, the decision to acquire these was taken after a traffic policeman was caught on camera hurling a brick at a woman he had stopped for jumping a red light in Central Delhi’s Golf Links area in May last year. The official, Satish Chander, was sacked but later reinstated with the force saying the woman had provoked him by abusing him and refusing to pay the fine.

“Such initiatives are important because most traffic violators start arguing and the officials confronting them have no idea how it will end,” said Goel. “With the help of these body cameras, we have tracked down quite a few offenders.”