THIS ROUND TO THE MEN IN KHAKI

IAS VS IPS

- Rahul Noronha

After ‘considering it’ for years, the Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, on November 21, announced that his government will introduce the police commissioner system in the state. The system essentially involves the transfer of magisterial functions from the district magistrate and the executive magistracy under him/ her to police officers. The IAS (Indian Administrative Service) lobby, which had successfully thwarted two previous attempts at this change—in 2012 and 2018—has finally relented, it appears. Chouhan says initially state capital Bhopal and commercial capital Indore will get police commissioners.

So why did the chief minister decide to bring in the police commissioner system even when there was no clamor for it nor a pressing law and order problem that merited such a response? Sources say the nudge came from Prime Minister Narendra Modi who, while addressing IPS probationers at the SVP National Police Academy in Hyderabad earlier this year, had said that states that hadn’t yet implemented the system, should consider doing so in cities with a million-plus population.