At present, there is a Women Protection Cell attached to the Crime Investigation Department (CID) to deal with crimes against women. But it only deals with major cases and leaves the rest to the local police.
However, the local police is ignoring cases related to trafficking of women. This is worrying the CID.
“Many instances of trafficking in women have come up in Vijayawada but cases are not being registered under the relevant Act,” said a top CID official.
“We wrote many letters to the Vijayawada police commissioner but there was no response. We are taking up the issue again now.” The government had decided to set up the WCPB after the High Court rapped it over the alarming increase in cases of missing women and children. It even summoned the director general of police for a personal explanation.
“There are many laws to protect women but a unified command is lacking to effectively enforce the laws and deal with the crimes,” said the inspector general of police (CID), Mr S. Umapathi.
The home minister, Mr K.Jana Reddy, announced in the budget session of the Assembly that the WCPB would soon be put in place but that has not happened as planned.
Mr Jana Reddy, in fact, held a meeting with women MLAs to take their suggestions on the WCPB. They suggested tough measures, besides good counselling programmes, to deal with the crimes.
Sources said the home department would consider all these suggestions while framing the framing the structure of WCPB.
Meanwhile, as per an undertaking given by the DGP to the High Court, a standard operating procedure has been evolved for station house officers to investigate cases of missing children and women. Statistics reveal that cases relating to missing children and women has gone up sharply in the last four years.
In all, 13,557 such cases were reported between 2004 and 2007 of which only 9,496 cases resulted in the missing persons returning safely. “This is posing a big challenge to us,” said a senior police officer. Even now, 4,061 persons remain untraced causing great anxiety to their families and police, which has been pulled up by the HC.