In police uniform proposal, juniors & seniors may be cut from the same cloth

Junior police officers complain their uniforms are made from poor quality cloth that tears within days .

KARACHI: The police department may see more egalitarian times ahead. In a first of its kind request, the police department has requested the Sindh government to give junior police officers an allowance to buy their own uniforms, something that senior officers already receive.

Although it is said that the proposal by the Sindh police department’s finance section will be approved within the next coming days, no timeframe has yet been finalised, The Express Tribune has learnt.

“There are very little chances of the proposal being rejected and I hope that it is accepted soon,” said DIG (Finance) Dost Ali Baloch, while speaking to The Express Tribune. He added that this is one of many changes they are undertaking to improve working conditions for the force.

According to the proposal, Rs600 as a uniform allowance will be added to the monthly salary of police officers, including police constables, head constables and assistant sub-inspectors.  The men will also be given Rs600 annually as a washing allowance. Officers from sub-inspectors to IGPs are already paid these amounts.

According to the system in place, junior officers get their uniforms from headquarters twice a year by showing their ‘kit’ card, which is issued when they sign up to the force. Officers are allowed one jacket in five years and a pair of shoes in three years, but obviously this is barely enough given daily wear and tear. As a result, most men just pay to have their own uniforms stitched. There are around six shops in the city where policemen can get uniforms by showing a departmental requisition letter.

News of the allowance proposal has been spreading among police stations where the men who do the brunt work of policing Karachi are ecstatic. “The way they give us uniforms is shameful,” said constable Mohammad Tahir. “The cloth is so bad that it wears away after two to four washes, but we have to use it for the whole year.”

An ASI welcomed the proposal but said that it should have been done earlier. “The department gives us very poor quality uniforms which we have to use the entire year,” said Ali Akbar who works in district east. “We take pride in our uniforms, who will respect us if they are torn?”

The staff responsible for distributing uniforms is also looking forward to the new system if it comes through. “We hope the proposal goes through so we do not have to deal with the distribution,” said a policeman at the Khwaja Ajmer Nagri police headquarters. “The senior officers buy good quality uniforms and give us poor quality uniforms for distribution and then people get upset with us.” Indeed, when the staff at Mobina police station learnt of the proposal while chatting with the finance staff, who came on a routine paperwork visit, they complained about corruption. They did not want to be named, but the men shared that they felt that the DIG had created this direct system in a bid to do away with corruption of the ‘middleman’. “They show the senior officers one type of cloth but the policemen get a very different type,” one clerk explained. As if to demonstrate, one man, who had his uniform personally tailored, rubbed the cloth in between his finger and thumb. The cloth for his shirt was a darker grey flecked with white, but the sipahi outside showed that his department-provided shirt was a faded grey and the material was threadbare.

A uniform costs between Rs3,000 and Rs10,000. The belt alone costs around Rs1,000, while shoes start from Rs4,000. It really just depends on how much money you want to spend, said one policeman. But on an average sub-inspector’s salary of Rs30,000 perhaps that allowance will be more than welcome.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 7^th, 2012.