On the 10th foundation day of Women Power Line (WPL) 1090, additional director general of police Neera Rawat spoke to Pathikrit Chakraborty on what the journey has been like. Excerpts:
How do you see the work of WPL 1090 over the past 10 years?
We started with 24 workstations with two 6-hour shifts. This was only to address cases of harassment. Ten years down the line, we have 154 workstations with 24-hour service. Not just harassment, we are also dealing with cyber bullying, stalking, and offline harassment. Today, we launched an extensive community participation programme for wider outreach which will show results.
What is the parameter to judge work by WPL?
An assessment of our work was recently done by UNICEF, a third party. It has given us a 98% satisfactory rate. We strive for better performance daily. When we started, we would receive 50-60 complaints a day; now, we are receiving 1,600 per day. This shows our efforts and spread of awareness.
Any new features of WPL?
We have started online counselling by UNICEFapproved counsellors, introduced ‘family friends relatives’ (FFR) system for habitual online harassers. From today, we have also begun structured awareness programmes, which include one-day programme for cops and three-day programme in self-defence training to girl students and other departments and security staff.
