The Home Ministry is seeking Finance Ministry consent to release Tk20.8cr – from the police’s own food fund – to give blockade-duty police daily allowances to buy snacks.
Under normal circumstances police authorities provide catering trucks or ferry services for on-duty staff to have a meal, but this has proved impossible during blockade duty.
A Finance Division official said the Home Ministry proposal did not provide a timetable but the Finance Ministry wanted a timetable.
In a separate move to meet the costs of the blockade duty, the Home Ministry has sought a special allocation of Tk83.5cr for overtime expenses and petrol costs.
With the increased geographic span of patrols and the longer duty hours during the blockade, authorities have failed to keep the force’s catering service going, a Home Ministry official said.
The police are unable to get food out to the many unscheduled patrols across the country or reach the patrols that are on duty on remote stretches of the highways, official sources said.
Officials said on-duty police cannot find the time to have breakfast, lunch or dinner because of the abnormally long work hours that have resulted from the hartal and transport blockade programmes ahead of the SSC exams.
Police Constable Alamgir who was on duty yesterday near the Secretariat building, the site of several crude bomb explosions on Sunday, told Dhaka Tribune: “We are lucky today because we were able to have lunch. Yesterday we spent the entire day and night on the Dhaka-Chittagong Highway. There was no time for lunch or dinner.”
He said: “Duty police need extra money to buy meals and snacks because we are patrolling remote areas of the country’s highways, railways and waterways. The government has already sanctioned a 30% risk allowance on top of our basic salary because of the dangers involved in doing this work.”
Large numbers of police personnel have arrived in Dhaka to bolster security here.
The extra police reinforcement personnel do not have sufficient time or space to sleep at Rajarbagh police lines or Mirpur police camp, he said.
The police proposal said some 94,949 policemen and policewomen – 62,802 personnel during the day shift and 32,147 during the night shift – have been working round the clock all over the country to maintain law and order.
To supply cooked or dry food to deployed police personnel, Tk7cr will be needed per day – at an estimated cost of Tk75 per head.
Accordingly, some Tk64cr will be required for three months from January 5 last, it said.
Bangladesh Police has already started spending money, from the Tk20.8cr it has asked to be made available, to give on-duty personnel snack allowances.
According to the proposal, of the total of Tk20.8cr, Metropolitan police will get Tk3cr, Dhaka Metropolitan Police will get Tk9.27cr, District police Tk7.50 cr, Railway police 20 lakh, and the Special Branch Tk83 lakh.