From the Desk of Additional Superintendent of Police, Sangli

It is easy to implement and develop Quality Management Systems in an industry or a business house, as there is a defined concept of customer and product. Professional relations between customer and supplier can be easily expressed in case of an industry as it runs on the economic principles of profit and loss.

But the establishment of Sangli District Police is not based on any of the above mentioned principles. Neither the receiver of the service is a customer, nor there is any product. Basically this is not a profit making institution. On the contrary it has to spend money for providing various services. So the staff working here is unaware of various concepts and definitions related to an industry, which is also a focus of ISO 9001 :2000.

There are around 30000 business institutions that have been certified for ISO 9001:2000 for quality management standard. But it was a challenge to implement this system all over the District and at 31 different locations. At the outset, I had to adapt myself to these concepts. As the top Management appointed me as the Management Representative, I adopted the responsibility and authority as per the standards of ISO 9001 :2000. I defined and developed various concepts in relation to police force like customer (society at large), product (service) and measurement of product (service quality measurement); process (FIR, Inquest, crime investigation and detection) etc.; while training all the policemen.

I had to explain these concepts repeatedly with examples to policemen, once these were defined. The important work thereafter was to prepare a written quality management system. It was decided to design the system in Marathi. This was also a challenge, as all the standards were originally in English and its verbatim translation in Marathi was changing its expected meaning. But I accepted the challenge and could succeed in developing all written systems. Training at all levels had to be given to establish the system. It was not a single person's job to do all this in just 5 months. I could succeed in getting ISO 9001:2000 certificates for all 31 police offices in Sangli District, only because of active participation and efforts made by my colleagues and subordinates.

Dr. Digambar Pradhan

Additional Superintendent of Police, Sangli

Important Links