Lalbazar: Going online. A Telegraph picture

Does the idea of lodging a complaint with a police station put you off? Are you fed up with the indifference of the cops?

If you dread to think of the men in uniform and their ways of functioning, Calcutta Police is trying hard to please you. From now on, all you have to do is to send your complaint via the electronic medium.

What?s more, officers will provide you with a follow-up report to assure you that lodging a complaint with the police is not an exercise in futility.

In a bid to revamp police functioning and simplify the process of lodging a complaint, Calcutta Police will introduce a system whereby all complaints will be electronically received, monitored and followed up.

The staff will download the complaints and send these to their respective divisional deputy commissioners of police and the assistant commissioners of police, along with the officers-in-charge of the police stations concerned.

If the police station concerned delays proceedings, its immediate seniors will be able to keep a track of the complaint.

?These complaints will be received in the mail server at the police headquarters in Lalbazar, downloaded and transferred to the respective heads of the police stations. The convenience factor apart, this will do away with the problem of jurisdiction,? explains Kuldeep Singh, joint commissioner of police (administration).

?Before launching this system, we want to ensure that a complainant receives a feedback of his effort,? he adds.

Two additional servers will be set up at the police headquarters ? one for the Calcutta Police Directorate and the other dedicated to the detective department (DD).

The project, being implemented by Webel, now ensures that DD departments will have a separate database on all cases concerned.

?This will give an officer of the DD wing the opportunity to browse all similar cases in the past and collect necessary information. The database will have all the details, including photographs of the accused, the seizures made and peculiarities, if any,? said a senior DD officer.

Officers-in-charge of police stations, too, will have access to this database through dial-ups.

Besides details of cases, the DD server will have separate data on the gangs and their heads operating in specific areas of the city.