Three years ago, it was announced that Uttar Pradesh was set to get India’s first dedicated highway patrol force to protect travellers on the state’s highways round the clock.

In the years since, even as no progress has been made on the ambitious project, there have been several major crimes on the highways, at least two of which grabbed headlines.

The most recent one was on May 25, when a gang of robbers allegedly accosted a family of eight on the Jewar-Bulandshahr road off the Yamuna Expressway in Uttar Pradesh, raped four women of the family, shot dead a male relative, and looted them of cash and valuables. The incident invited comparisons to another highway rape and robbery incident in the state last year. In July 2016, a group of highway robbers raped a mother and her 13-year-old daughter after dragging them out of their car on the Ghaziabad-Aligarh highway near Bulandshahr.

Despite these and several other incidents – according to this Hindustan Times report, Uttar Pradesh accounts for the highest number of highway crimes in the country – the highway patrol project remains an ambitious plan that exists only on paper.

The UP Highway Police was announced in 2014 and envisaged as a force that would monitor the state’s highways round the clock. It was a component of the massive Uttar Pradesh Core Road Development Network Project, funded by the World Bank, for which the state received about Rs 250 crore in financial aid in 2014. National Highways 2 and 25 were chosen for a pilot-run of the project.

Under the highway patrol project, there would be 250 emergency response vehicles (two- and four-wheelers) and one control room for every 40 km stretch. Reports said that the personnel for this force would be trained in New Zealand and have designer uniforms.

“The project demanded deputation of around 600 personnel and specialised training for which UP Police had collaborated with police departments abroad,” said a senior police official who did not want to be identified.

Pipe dream

After the Bulandshahr gangrape of 2016, the Samajwadi Party state government at the time sped up the process of setting up a dedicated emergency response system, called UP-100 and also asked for the Highway Patrol project to be implemented at the earliest.

But while UP-100, with a centralised police control room to receive distress calls and round the clock and coordinate quikc responses, was launched in in October in Lucknow the Uttar Pradesh, no progress was made on the Highway Patrol force. As a temporary fix, the police decided to use the UP-100 system to deal with highway cases as well.

“During a meeting in the last quarter of 2016, it was decided that until UP Highway Police materialised on ground, the UP-100 system would develop a mechanism in dealing with highway emergencies,” said a senior police official. “Since then, all police stations that have highway stretches under their jurisdiction have been asked to keep at least one emergency response vehicle reserved for highways, which is to be managed directly by the UP-100 control room.”

However, the official explained, there is a shortage of emergency vehicles and it is often impossible to reserve them only for highway emergencies, as they are also needed for other law-and-order crises. Moreover each police station has several villages and highway stretches under its jurisdiction, so it is nearly impossible for them keep an eye on every nook and corner, round the clock.

Admitting that a dedicated highway patrol force was the need of the hour, the official said there is no deadline for its implementation yet, adding, “At a time when we should have special criminal tracking system for gangs operating on the highway, specialised patrolling strategies and special teams to deal with them, we are doing with an ordinary system.”