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Police station do not want to Tiss and tell

Prayas has now written to the additional chief secretary (home), Chitkala Zutshi. “It would be good to have such cells and funding should not be a problem.

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Institute’s proposal to have social workers helping cops finds very few takers


On the lines of western countries where social workers are an integral part of the judicial system, Prayas, a field action project of Centre for Criminology and Justice at the Tata Institute of Social Science (Tiss) has been stressing to appoint social workers at every police station across the state. A proposal was submitted to the home department by the then director general of police Shivajirao Baravkar in April 1993. However, even after 15 years, there has been little progress.

Prayas has now written to the additional chief secretary (home), Chitkala Zutshi. “It would be good to have such cells and funding should not be a problem. The women’s cell in the commissionarate has group of social workers and the initiative has been of great help. We will look into the report,” Zutshi said.

“There is a tremendous need of social workers in police stations as people who approach the police often have complex problems, which the police leave unsolved,” said Vijay Raghavan, assistant professor, Tiss. Raghavan heads Prayas, which has been working for the placement of social workers in the criminal justice system for 18 years.

In 1992, Prayas submitted a proposal to the director-general of police S Ramamurthy saying it was experimenting with the idea. Ramamurthy had forwarded the proposal to his senior officers and the Police-Tiss Committee to study the need of trained social workers in the judicial system. The committee, headed by inspector-general of police TK Choudhary, submitted a report to Baravkar in April 1993. Ramamurthy had resigned by then. “The report said such an initiative would be of great help to the police and the public and would play a vital role in changing the face of the legal system,” Raghavan said.

Baravkar had submitted the proposal to the home department. However, nothing concrete had worked out since then. Prayas members were told that allocation of resources was a major problem as paying salaries to social workers was a hitch.
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