MUMBAI: Vijay Khere, a deputy superintendent of police at Cuffe Parade ’s Maharashtra Cyber—the nodal agency for the state's cyber security—may be inching towards retirement but the 55-year-old still has very good reasons to call himself a social climber. Recently, when the King’s Circle-based cop forgot his spectacles at home, he sprinted up three floors to fetch them even though the lift was working. While it was actor Akshay Kumar ’s fitness regime that had long goaded Khere into abandoning the lift in his residential building, the renewed speed with which the cop ascends the stairs to his home has a lot to do with the latest policy of his self-styled workplace guru and colourful boss, senior cop Harish Baijal Every Friday since December 20, Khere and other employees of Maharashtra Cyber climb up 32 floors of the 32-storeyed World Trade Centre at Cuffe Parade because Baijal—a deputy inspector general who rides a cycle to work at times—felt that the exercise would “promote health consciousness” among the cyber crime staff before weekend reverie kicks in. So, every week, following a roll call by Baijal around 9.45am on the ground floor, the employees follow their boss up roughly 750 steps as a team. That’s how, for instance, many discovered that the stairs tend to taper after the 30th floor.While this exercise mirrors the various motivational sports and physical gaming activities undertaken through the year by startups and corporates across the nation, it stands out given its weekly nature. “You should see their expressions at the end,” says Baijal about his staff members. “They all feel like they’ve achieved something spectacular.”Though his vertical policy is not mandatory for all and “employees are free to take the lift on a certain floor in case they are unable to climb further”, his breathless idea predictably wasn’t an instant hit. If Khere’s wife worried about his aging heart, intern Smita Shitole ’s family was apprehensive about the effects on their asthmatic daughter’s lungs. Two months into the vertical marching order, though, the owners of both organs say they are functioning rather well. “It used to take me 20 minutes to climb 32 floors. Now it takes me 14,” says Khere, who also credits the weekly policy for his ability to finish the recent five-kilometre police marathon in a feverish 32 minutes. Besides, at the age when most men get ready to hang up their boots, Khere has started running 6km in them every other day from King’s Circle to Shivaji Park, thanks to the boost in stamina. “I want to run 10 kilometres in the next police marathon,” he says.Twenty-two-year-old Shitole, on her part, has collected three roses from the various people her big boss invites to the terrace to felicitate employees after a successful climb. Shitole confesses that while she climbs slowly, she makes sure to complete the exercise and has now gained enough “confidence” to choose to walk from Vidyavihar to her home in Kurla’s LBS Marg at times. But the transformation Baijal—who sometimes invites people to felicitate his employees with roses at the end of the climb—is most proud of is that of 23-year-old, five-foot-three-inches-tall intern Gauri Sawant. “I now fit into my old clothes,” says heavy-set Sawant, adding that weight doesn’t make her run of breath after ten floors anymore.Given the lurking danger of being “carried away by the group”, though, sports medicine consultant Dr Anant Joshi advises caution before undertaking such vigorous exercise. “Listening to the body is key. Not everyone’s body is designed the same way. In cases like stair-climbing, the impact is such that your knee cap and thigh bone takes three times your body weight, specially in women who are knock-kneed. In those cases, the knee cap tends to track sideways which may predispose them to early wear and tear. If you are not accustomed to heavy exercise, the key is to increase exercise in small increments,” he says.Meanwhile, watching Sawant—who has begun to walk home from Santa Cruz station to her home near Kalina University over the past two months—has rekindled Baijal’s faith in his own local Fit India policy. “There are so many skyscrapers in Mumbai and it just takes a few minutes to climb the stairs. If everyone begins to walk, imagine how healthy the city can be,” says the 57-year-old cop, who did not cluck his tongue recently when he found a long queue outside a lift in a building opposite the Mantralaya in which he was supposed to attend a meeting on the 17th floor. “I said, ‘to hell with it’ and climbed,” he says.