Govt yet to get Rs 5 crore for cop protection

Mumbai: The Maharashtra government is yet to recover dues amounting to Rs 5.11 crore from 38 people to whom police protection had been provided in Mumbai, details received under the Right to Information (RTI) revealed.

The police authorities, however, said they are in the process of recovering the dues. The state government had faced criticism from the Bombay high court over non-recovery of pending dues. A RTI query which was made with the senior inspector of the protection branch has revealed that from 2007 to 2017, the Mumbai police provided protection to 2,293 people and received Rs 44 crore in lieu of that. Till March 2018, the Mumbai police had provided protection to 219 people and received Rs 1.54 crore from them as charges, as per the information furnished to RTI applicant Nagmani Pandey.

Citing the section Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, the officer declined to provide the names of defaulters, saying doing so will put them in serious trouble.

The section prevents the disclosure of any personal information, which does not have any link to any public activity or interest.

Hearing a PIL filed by advocate Sunny Punamiya, the high court last year had ordered the government to recover police security dues from individuals and from political parties if their functionaries had not paid pending dues.

However, Vinayak Deshmukh, deputy commissioner of police (protection), said: “We keep sending notices to the parties. Recovery is a sort of ongoing process and this process is still going on.”