LAHORE: The Deputy Inspector General of Police (Operations) Lahore has held the force’s first Facebook khuli kutchehry, an open court conducted entirely on a digital platform, with more than 10,000 citizens participating online from Pakistan and from various countries around the world.
The 45-minute online session saw citizens submit their problems and complaints through Facebook. The DIG Operations personally telephoned a number of participants to hear their grievances and directed the relevant officers to redress the complaints on a priority basis.
The DIG Operations also instructed officers to provide feedback to citizens on the resolution of their complaints, telling participants: “Your opinion is paramount for us, and action will be taken on what you identify.”
He said an effective mechanism is being established for follow-up until a complaint is resolved, so that citizens’ complaints are not merely registered but produce a demonstrable outcome.
The DIG appealed to citizens to support the police by identifying social and moral ills in their communities.
He said action against illegal activities conducted under the cover of massage centres will be visible, and cautioned citizens to be careful about fraudulent housing societies.
The DIG Operations advised residents to verify with the Lahore Development Authority that a housing society has been approved before purchasing a plot or property, and to insist on a written agreement for every kind of transaction.
The khuli kutchehry — literally “open court” — is one of the oldest instruments of subcontinental administration, a public sitting at which an official hears grievances directly without the intermediation of clerks or subordinate staff. Its purpose has always been the same: to break the chain of gatekeepers between a citizen and the officer with authority to act.
Its weakness has always been the same too. Physical open courts are limited by who can travel to them, who can take a day off work, and who feels safe walking into a police facility to make a complaint about the police. Women, daily-wage workers and residents of peripheral areas are systematically under-represented in them.
That is the gap a digital format addresses. It costs a complainant nothing to participate, requires no travel, and — importantly — creates a written record visible to other members of the public, which changes the incentive structure for the officer receiving the complaint.
The value of this exercise rests entirely on the follow-up mechanism the DIG referred to, and that mechanism has not yet been described publicly. A 45-minute session with 10,000 participants can accommodate direct engagement with perhaps a few dozen; what happens to the remainder is the whole question.
Lahore Police already operate complaint channels — the Punjab Police Khidmat Markaz, the 15 helpline, the Police Station Record Management System and the Chief Minister’s Complaint Cell — and the persistent public criticism of all of them is not that complaints cannot be filed but that filing produces no traceable outcome. If the Facebook kutchehry becomes another intake point without a case-tracking number and a disposal deadline, it will generate goodwill for one afternoon and cynicism thereafter.
There is a data point worth requesting; of the complaints received in this session, how many were assigned a tracking reference, how many were disposed of within 30 days, and how many complainants received the feedback the DIG ordered? Publishing that figure after a month would distinguish this from a public-relations exercise.
The housing-society warning, meanwhile, is unglamorous but arguably the most useful thing said in the session. Illegal and unapproved private schemes remain among the largest single categories of fraud complaint in Lahore, and the LDA’s approved-scheme list is publicly searchable. The DIG’s advice — verify approval, insist on written agreements — is sound and costs a prospective buyer nothing to follow.
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