Cops gliding on segways are an attraction at Chennai Central

The last couple of weeks, passengers at Chennai Central, or Puratchi Thalaivar Dr MG Ramachandran Central Railway Station, as you’ve got to refer to it now, have been getting to see something interesting: uniformed police officers gliding past them on Segways, or FreeGos, as they call them. Intrigued, we decided to check it out, and yes, there are cops doing the rounds on these gyroscopic self-balancing scooters.It’s a compact railway station, with 12-single line platforms, so what is this all about, we asked the cops, who told us that it was a Railway Protection Force (RPF) initiative.
“This is to aid surveillance, faster mobility as well as give the cops on round a better vantage point,” inspector LS Sivanesan, RPF, informed us. “It was started in Mumbai in February on the Western and Central lines, and now, these vehicles have come to us in Chennai,” he informed, “In fact we’d received these FreeGos in September — it took us a few days to train our personnel and we launched this officially on Oct 2, Gandhi Jayanti. All these vehicles have the RPF monogram and stickers, so they’re just like our police vandi for us.”
As we were speaking, RPF personnel Sanjeev Kumar zoomed past us, and we stopped him and asked him how it felt. “It’s easy for us now — if there is a passenger complaint, we’re able to reach there fast. Sometimes, during peak hours when the station becomes very crowded, I face a balancing issue, but otherwise, it’s increased my efficiency,” he told us. Don John, his colleague, added, “Vandi vandathu lendhu, patrolling has become easy. We are able to quickly deal with squatters and other other offenders. It gives us a presence that instils fear among the masses. Emergencies can be dealt with, with minimum delay. When this vehicle wasn’t there, we had to walk, and we’d often get waylaid, but now, they give us way.”
Echoing Don John, Sivanesan adds, “I feel apart from making us more efficient, it also enhances our visibility — which acts as a deterrent for criminals. If we are walking around the milling crowd, we’re one among them. On this segway, we’re two feet off the ground and this contraption is attention-grabbing, so a cop gets noticed from afar — bhayam thooki kaatum. There are 12 platforms and 6 segways, as of now. If this takes off in a big way here, in a month or so, we’d be taking this initiative to Egmore Station next.”