A kiosk at the mall allows people to file a police complaint.
C S Putta Rao, a retired bank officer, is filing a police complaint against a real estate company which allegedly cheated him.
He is nowhere near a police station. Mr Putta Rao is filing the complaint at a mall in Bengaluru's Malleswaram. The mall has a high-tech kiosk that allows the public to file a police complaint and get a copy of the FIR right there.
Mr Putta Rao told NDTV, "It was often very difficult to file the complaint. Because the station officer would not be there, we had to go from one station to the other. Now, with the introduction of this system, it has become very easy."
At the kiosk, with the press of a button, the complainant gets connected to the police control room, where an officer receives the complaint via video-conference, and guides him on how to go about filing it.
The complaint is then sent to the control room, where it is registered as a First Information Report or FIR.
The complainant can also file the complaint verbally; the officer at the control room writes down the FIR and a copy of it can be printed at the kiosk. The FIR is sent from the control room to the concerned police station directly.
Alok Kumar, Additional Commissioner or Police, Law and Order, said, "Bangalore is a high-tech city; it is the IT capital of India. Sometimes, people are sent from one police station to the other and still the FIR is not registered. This kiosk is manned 24/7 by a policeman to avoid with these problems."
The complain-via-kiosk system has been installed on a trial basis; if the public responds positively to it, many more such kiosks will come up across the city.
So residents of Bengaluru - who are uncomfortable about visiting a police station, or are not sure about which jurisdiction their area falls under, or just find it difficult to make their way through the city's notorious traffic jams - can now visit such a kiosk and file their complaints.