Even a policeman has to wear a seatbelt, says former chief traffic cop Satish Mathur

He entered Yerawada jail the same day as did a super star.
He as the IG (Prisons), the star as a convict. Mr. Satish Mathur,
Air-India.s Director, Security, speaks at the last meeting

The law does not exempt police personnel from wearing a seatbelt while driving a vehicle. This requirement is mandated by the Motor Vehicles Act and there is no exception to the rule.

Police personnel are allowed only one exception . they can take their vehicles into one-way streets.

These and other key points were made by the friendly neighbourhood cop, Mr. Satish Mathur, described by some as a .socialite. and by others as a .Page 3 person., while speaking at the last meeting.

But one thing on which everyone seems to agree is that he is one of the most affable persons in the force who is not affected by celebrity (he cares neither for film stars nor for the opinions of nightingales).

It was Roda Billimoria who had wondered why, when she was booked for the offence of driving without a seatbelt, the policeman doing so himself was not wearing a seatbelt. Did the law have a discrepancy in this regard, she asked.

No, said Mr. Mathur. The law had no such discrepancy. He pointed out that even when a vehicle was moving at a slow speed, if another one hit it from the rear, then the whiplash from the impact could cause major cervical problems. Many lives had been lost for lack of a seatbelt.

Mr. Satish Mathur, a graduate of St. Stephen.s, Delhi (he stood first in M.A., History), joined the IPS in 1981 and rose steadily to become the Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic) in Bombay.

Attached to the Maharashtra cadre, he has served with the CBI, as Inspector-General of Prisons and is on deputation as Director, Security, with Air-India. He was awarded the President.s Police Medal for Distinguished Service in August, 2007.

The Chief Minister never travelled by road from Bombay to Pune .
to avoid .dangerous. Panvel, says Mr. Satish Mathur.
He is seen in the company of (second picture), Pradeep Saxena,
President Dr. Rumi Jehangir and Hon. Secretary Paul George

He became popular in Bombay during his tenure as Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic); he introduced an interactive traffic police website for dissemination of mass communication and also infused dynamic signboards on the roads for the first time in the country.

Speaking on .The experiences of an enforcer., he recalled that the day he went to Pune to take over as IG (Prisons), a popular film star who was prosecuted in the Bombay bomb blasts case of 1993, also reached there as a prisoner.

But starting from the beginning, Mr. Mathur said one of his first assignments was at Nhava-Sheva port, now called the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (or JNPT). A lot of firm steps had to be taken to ensure that the port came up.

There were severe problems in Panvel where the rule of law did not appear to prevail. When the Japanese consultants drew plans for the port, they did so without visiting the site. They had no idea that the land for which they were drawing plans had innumerable crowded homes.

As a result, they drew lines and walls through the homes of hundreds of people. When this was brought to their notice, they said that they had not been allowed to visit the site because of law and order problems.

Mr. Mathur and his team were able to enforce order and take the Japanese to the site; they saw the houses and structures and came up with a new map based on which the Jawaharlal Nehru Port finally came up.

.In those days Panvel, now called Navi Mumbai, used to be full of challenges. Law and order was not a known concept. The people enforced the law. When I took over, I can now reveal, the Chief Minister never dared to travel from Bombay to Pune by road because he would have had to cross Panvel.

.But industries came up. The first plant came up at Patalganga and some of the industrialists have become very big. They changed the culture and tenor of that area over a period of time, as a result of which the militancy of the local population has gradually gone down, but it.s still a problem..

Mr. Mathur said his next major challenge was the murder of Gen. Vaidya in Pune on a Sunday when he was far away from home (he lived close to the place where Vaidya was shot). He rushed back to investigate.

But the police remained clueless for two long months; even the CBI and the other agencies that had been called in failed to make any headway.

Finally, a colleague hesitantly mentioned that there was a little girl in Sangli who, if approached and briefed, would sit, meditate and reconstruct an event. Anybody would have laughed away the suggestion. But as a desperate measure, it was decided to summon the girl.

The nine-year-old came, was briefed and sat in meditation. When she emerged, she said the killers had turned to the right after committing the crime and had gone into a huge complex with iron gates; a .huge bungalow., she called it.

Numerous search teams went to look for such a place. But there was none. When it was felt that the Army Welfare Housing Society could be the .huge bungalow with iron gates., the very idea was pooh-poohed.

.How could terrorists hide in an army housing colony? We didn.t go in and closed our inquiries from outside. I came back..

Ultimately, the murderers were caught, fortuitously on the very day that the late Rajiv Gandhi came to condole Mrs. Vaidya.

And then, Mr. Mathur said, the murderers said yes, they had lived inside the Army Welfare Housing Society!

But since the police were sceptical and still not convinced, the killers took them to the society, quietly produced a key and opened the door to the flat they had rented.

It was a shock for the police; but the lesson they learnt was . verify every little scrap of information obtained, no matter how absurd or illogical it might seem to be.

The Gen. Vaidya case was also the first to be tried under the now-lapsed TADA in the country.

(The law was passed in order to help the Punjab Police, but that State conducted its first prosecution in a TADA case only five years later.)

The police also obtained convictions, with death by hanging for the accused, and this was also the first time that terrorists were hung to death in India, which sent a message to other terrorists.

After a few other assignments, Mr. Mathur landed up with the CBI.

The first major task given to him was the Bombay blasts case of 1993. It was a peculiar situation . the Bombay police had already investigated the case and sent up the chargesheet, when the CBI came into the picture.

It took more than 14 years for the judgment to be delivered in this case . an example of the slow pace of the delivery of judgement. The case was huge, in terms of witnesses and so on. But it could have been concluded earlier had the Judge been faster.

He had given the Judge the entire proceedings in a nutshell (running into 700 pages).

The Judge did achieve a milestone in the case by convicting 100 people. But he left out of the scope of TADA one of the most prominent characters involved (a film star).

According to Mr. Mathur, the film star should not have been left out because the law was very clear, that anyone found in possession of a certain class of weapons in a certain area was liable under TADA.

Interestingly, he left the CBI around that time and took up his assignment with the traffic department. He was in this department for four years . the four years that it took the Judge to write his judgement.

.After I finished my traffic police assignment and joined as Inspector-General of Prisons, the very day that I joined, my highprofile friend also came to the jail with me. We both entered Yerawada together, he as an inmate and I as the jailor..

Mr. Mathur then turned to his work as the Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic). He drew attention to one bare fact.

The population of New Zealand was 42 lakhs. But the .day-time population. of Colaba went up by 42 lakhs every day! In other words, 42 lakh people came to Colaba in just a few hours and went back every day. How could anyone base traffic plans on .imported. models?

The people had high expectations of the traffic police, but at the time that he took over there wasn.t even a website. And the government had no money, so some of his friends got together and created a website. Most of the ideas and innovations put in place had stood the test of time, though the site was just two to three years old.

His department was one of the most woefully short-staffed traffic police organisations in the country. But he and his team had managed to get about 1,000 people added to the force during his tenure.

Mr. Mathur said since it was not possible to increase the road length, the only way out appeared to be flyovers. But he favoured long flyovers, not those that were 400 to 500 metres long because these did not really help clear the traffic. Long ones, like the J.J. flyover, were far better.

The city had a huge mix of vehicles and this also created difficulties. Once the .Nano. hit the roads, it would add to the problems since it would be a highly-manoeuvrable car. He had nothing against small cars but felt that it would be better to ban all big vehicles and allow only small ones.

Turning to the other innovation, viz., the ATC signal (automated traffic control), he said it was being implemented seven years after it was first mooted. In this, sensors would judge the density of traffic and automatically change signals to allow traffic to flow smoothly.

Since he was convinced that the project would take years to complete, he had taken away the CCTV component from it and implemented it earlier. Now, 60 junctions had closed-circuit television cameras working, with the pictures going to the traffic police headquarters and to the Police Commissioner.s office.

Mr. Mathur confessed that when the ATC was planned, traffic was a major problem in South Bombay. But now, when work on the project had started in South Bombay, the scenario had changed . the traffic bottlenecks now occurred mainly in the suburbs.

The municipal corporation was installing ATCs at 50 sites in South Bombay and would attempt another 100 in the suburbs at a later date.

Another innovation was sending out mass emails to inform the people about the traffic situation at various places so that they could make their plans accordingly.

Returning to the CCTV project, he said it would be one of the best in the world because it used excellent cameras, was based on optical fibre and had bandwidth provided by a major company.

Once the entire city was covered, it could go public . offering pictures to a service provider, who would buy it from the police or the government, pay for it (thus helping to recover the cost of the project) and allow the public to access it. At the end of the day, it would enable the public to avoid areas with traffic jams.

The system would also help in times of emergency such as the Bombay floods of 2005 and the train blasts of 2006.

The bandwidth supply was underground, but if the electricity did not fail, then one could see what was happening all over the city, especially in areas around one.s office, business or residential premises.

When the system was implemented in Worli Naka, one of the powerful cameras provided a peep into a room at Sea Rock Hotel. This was an issue that had to be addressed as a priority and as soon as possible.

Mr. Mathur said .balance-time indicators. (which showed how many seconds remained before a signal changed) were introduced through sponsors, as were huge electronic bill boards to convey messages from the traffic police.

Sadly, these were only being used to inform people about the number jailed for drunken driving and so on. Ideally, they should have conveyed live information.

When he was with the traffic police, he faced problems when he put out information about traffic being affected because of visits by the President or the Prime Minister.

He was hauled up for letting out .secrets.. But he countered this by pointing out that local partymen and corporators put up so many hoardings and posters, that every child in the street knew who was coming and when.

.I said, you can prosecute me, but I am still going to go ahead. After a time they realised that it was not much use to obstruct this and we were able to push it through..

Touching on the ATC project once again, Mr. Mathur said the project went through tough bureaucratic wrangling. One of the stipulations in the tender was that the Indian partner in the joint venture company to be floated should have had an annual expenditure turnover of Rs. 40 crores on traffic.

But a simple calculation showed that when the entire country did not spend more than Rs. 8 to Rs. 10 crores a year on traffic, no single company could have had a turnover of Rs. 40 crores in the previous year. Later, the World Bank revised the norms.

The ATC system was working in about 100 cities in the world, but nowhere was it as dynamic as was being planned in Bombay. It would compare with Kuala Lumpur and a few other cities, but those that had installed it earlier, in the West and in the US, had the old system.

In the course of his presentation, Mr. Mathur briefly touched on a few other traffic-related issues:

He touched on the two-laning of the Sion flyover; the new Metro lines; the suspended bridge over the sea from Bandra to Worli; traffic planning and arrangements for the Bombay Marathon (which was earlier declared as unviable); and so on.

Finally, turning to his assignment with Air-India, all he could say was that it was putting together a new fleet and was serious about acquiring 111 new aircraft. But that would happen by the year 2012.

.My PR guys have said that we are the best South Asian airlines, the most preferred international airline, the most preferred domestic airline, the most trusted airline, the best west-bound airline and so on,. Mr. Mathur concluded.

Whereupon, someone from the audience brought the house down by saying, .You could be prosecuted for saying all that!.

The speaker joined in the laughter that followed.

Answering questions, Mr. Mathur first faced Shyamniwas Somani who lamented the fact that ambulances were not given the right of way on the city's streets.

Mr. Mathur responded by stating that the new ATC system would give priority to ambulances if they registered with the traffic police.

As for the public giving space to ambulances, this could be achieved through an awareness campaign.

When asked about deaths occurring at the end of long-haul flights, he said the fact that some planes were airborne for 16 hours was a hazard by itself. The best way to tackle this was to seek more medical assistance.

PDG Manibhai Doshi asked how he could reduce the two hours he spent travelling from Juhu to the city.

The answer lay in air-conditioned local trains, Mr. Mathur said. Efforts in that direction had already been launched.

As for the propensity of the traffic police to switch off the signals during heavy rains, he said it was a misconception that traffic was better handled manually. Once the ATC system was in place, it would not be possible for anyone to switch off signals.

Finally, the flyover at Pedder Road. Mr. Mathur said he was in favour of it because it was a public project, for the public good and would be erected on a public road.

No individual had the right to dictate conditions, even if that person happened to be a living legend. .Infrastructure is the prerogative of the people,. he added.

The speaker was introduced by Sameer Tapia, while the vote of thanks was proposed by Ratan Tankha.