Chhattisgarh Project

CHRI's focus is on creating a network of community resource persons who are career police personnel, yet sensitive to the requirements of the community and involved in gradually training their peers so that a ripple effect takes place to inculcate human rights culture in the day to day work.

CHRI has identified reform-minded officers within the police with whom to carry out sensitisation modules. The focus is on training Assistant Sub-Inspector, Sub-Inspector and Inspector rank officers who are mostly posted at the police stations and have maximum contact with the public. Modules and Background reading materials in Hindi & English by CHRI and Background reading materials in Hindi & English by MARG are attached. Over the last four years CHRI is training a minimum of 100 personnel in batches of 25 over four days each year and about 300 personnel in all. The four-day police training programmes on human rights has been held in the following districts:

• Durg, (16-18 January, 2006)
• Kawardha (December15-18, 2005): Agenda
• Rajnandgaon (17-20 November, 2005)
• Jagdalpur (14 - 15 July, 2004)
• Ambikapur (7 - 10 July, 2004)
• Bilaspur (24 - 27 May, 2004)
• Raipur (14 - 17th Feb, 2004)
  

CHRI has completed the training of around 225 police personnel at the cutting edge ranks i.e. ASI/SI TI in the above seven Human Rights Sensitisation trainings held till date.

The personnel are drawn from the police stations and the staff of the police training school and state human rights commission. CHRI uses the training to inculcate democratic norms of good policing by introducing: international standards in human rights norms; the rights of citizens as embedded in the Constitution and the law; recent court judgments; and the National Human Rights Commission's directives to make the police force more accountable to law. On the fourth day of the training a police public interface is organised. For a summary of the findings from such interfaces please click here.

After the training these police officers are expected to become community resource persons and facilitate training and disseminating information on police reforms to their peers.