Inquiry panel clears Assam police on quality of bullet proof jackets

GUWAHATI: The one-man enquiry committee to probe the quality of a set of bullet proof jackets has given a clean chit to the Assam Police in its final report, according to a source.

The Assam government had constituted the inquiry committee headed by Additional Chief Secretary Kumar Sanjay Krishna following the death of Sub Inspector Bhaskar Kalita when bullets fired by ULFA(I) terrorists during an encounter on May 4 at Bordumsa pierced through his bullet-proof jacket.

“The enquiry report was submitted to the chief secretary on August 10. It evaluated all quality aspects of the batch of jackets under question and it found that the products were as per standards and there were no deviations,” a source in the Home Department said.

The Assam Police had received 1,560 bullet resistant jackets in January 2013 after a prolonged tender process, which began in June 2010, and were distributed to the personnel in all districts in the subsequent months.

After Kalita’s death, his family members, opposition parties and a few social activists raised questions about the quality of the jackets procured by the force and a batch was in dispute.

In the beginning of the probe, Krishna randomly picked five jackets of the same batch from Jorhat and Tezpur and sent them to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Chandigarh, for a quality check.

“The CFSL report has come positive. They have checked the bullet resistant power of the vests and inferred that these are of very high quality state-ofthe-art jackets,” the source said.

While procuring the jackets, the then Additional Director General of Police (MPC), Anil Kumar Jha, who had issued the supply order, for the first time in the history of the force, tested the products at the CFSL.

In the procurement exercise, the technical committee was headed by former Inspector General of Police (SOU) N I Hussain, while the purchase committee was headed by then Director General of Police Shankar Barua.

While carrying out a departmental enquiry over the incidents leading to death of Kalita, the Assam Police had found that the officer was not wearing the jacket in a “proper manner”.

The bullet proof jacket comprised two layers -- hard and soft armour panels -- and both needs to be worn together for the best protection, but Kalita went out for the operation only with the hard panel.

“Moreover, the jackets were capable of resisting a bullet from 10 metres range. But Kalita was shot at point blank range and only the hard panel was simply insufficient to stop the bullet,” another source in the know of the development said.

These particular set of jackets have been attracting controversies since the beginning of the tender process, in which Bangalore-based Tata Advanced Materials and New Delhi-based SM Pulp Packaging took part.

After the rigorous quality checks by the technical committee, Tata Advanced Materials was asked to supply the jackets for a price of Rs 37,668.57 (inclusive of all taxes).

A Kanpur-based individual had raised alarm alleging irregularities in the process, forcing Barua to issue a “Speaking Order” in September 2011 that cleared the entire exercise and termed the person as “fictitious and anonymous”.