In Assam’s remote villages police is not a dreaded word. And that’s all due to the efforts of a project started by the present DIG (CID), Kuladhar Saikia.Three years ago when Saikia was DIG at Kokrajhar, five villagers of Thaigerguri were killed. It was a case of a witch-hunt. But Saikia saw this not just as a law and order problem. An award-winning short story writer, Saikia toured the village and found that illiteracy, ignorance and poverty were the demons that lived with these Bodo tribals. Their situation was made worse by the refusal of the civic administration to enter this militancy haunted zone.Saikia got cracking. He made the community fix its small problems themselves and promised that the police would watch over. He called this new project Prahari—an acronym for Pragatir Hake Raij which means people’s initiative for progress.‘‘It is a wonderful initiative for participatory development and community policing,’’ says Dipali Basumatary, a resident of village Thaigerguri. As a result of the project, awareness about social evils has shot up in these villages. So, witch-hunting has become a thing of the past. The project also started self-employment schemes and today women in Thaigerguri own 15 electric spinning machines.Saikia’s experiment prompted Assam Police director-general Hare Krishna Deka to declare Prahari a state-wide project. Today 40 villages in the state are covered under it.‘‘We don’t give them any money. We just show them the way to do things with whatever is available locally. This way we have prevented the villagers from looking at the government for small things like repairing the village school or draining out excess water from the fields,’’ says Saikia, the nodal officer for Project Prahari.After the police, it’s now the banks who have joined the effort. For instance, in Lauripara over 60 women now have bank accounts. The project has also contributed in improving the health of these villages. With more people visiting government hospitals instead of quacks, the number of malaria and water-borne diseases has come down.The police presence in these villages has also reduced crime and helped keep militants away. Clearly, this is one region where the police has arrived on time.
