The Hindu /Jaideep Shenoy, Savitha Suresh Babu

Mangalore, Jan 23: The Police Department is making changes in its training programme for personnel who are being recruited, and is reorienting its in-service personnel with issues and concerns of modern-day relevance such as terrorism, naxalism and white-collar crimes.

It has prepared a draft police training manual to reflect these realities, and it will be released once the national manual is out, Additional Director-General of Police (Recruitment and Training) D V Guruprasad said here.

He said that policemen were being trained on gender sensitivity, child issues and ways to deal with people who had AIDS. The aim of such an exercise was to ensure that policemen were in tune with things happening around them, he said.

Observing that a lot more needed to be done in presenting the "humane side" of the department to society, Dr Guruprasad said a major problem was paucity of qualified teachers who could deal with these issues at Police Training Academy and police training schools.

Recruitment

Dr Guruprasad said the process of recruiting 4,317 constables had been completed in 22 of the 30 police units in the State.

Of these, 2,200 would be deployed in Bangalore and the rest throughout the State, he said. The process would be completed by February 15, he added.

Physical efficiency tests for aspirants who had applied for the post of police sub-inspectors (PSI) were held in all districts for the first time.

The written examination would be held in range headquarters on February 4, he said. He said the department would need another 240 police sub-inspectors and about 2,000 constables. A notification would be issued to recruit 1,000 constables and 125 police sub-inspectors shortly, he said.

Gender sensitivity

Several States were trying to emulate the gender sensitivity programme of the Karnataka police. Dr. Guruprasad, nodal officer of the State gender sensitivity programme, said the police would conduct training programmes on gender sensitivity for personnel of the southern States in March.

The programme, first of its kind in the country, was launched in 2003 in association with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Nearly 6,000 police personnel of the State had been trained since then.

The target was to cover 20,000 personnel, Dr. Guruprasad said. The training covers issues concerning women, children and AIDS. "The idea is to have friendly policing," he said.

Initially, the trainers were from UNICEF and non-governmental organisations. But now, 35 persons from the department had been trained to conduct the programme, he added.