Saturday 27 / April / 2024
Muscat: Non Resident Indians from Uttar Pradesh (UP) living in the Sultanate may soon receive Oman-specific UP police social media accounts to assist them.
This programme would include a Twitter handle, a Facebook page and a WhatsApp number.
The accounts would help Uttar Pradesh-domicile citizens in Oman follow up on criminal complaints they may have filed in their home state, have the police check on their elderly parents back home or report any crime that may have taken place on their property in Uttar Pradesh, engage with police initiatives, along with other tasks.
The initiative is part of a larger programme from the Uttar Pradesh police to have country-specific social media accounts in countries where a sizeable number of people from UP live. Several accounts have already been set up, including in Britain and United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Lucknow-based Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP) Rahul Srivastava said that each country-specific handle would be operated by a coordinator based in that country, adding that a co-ordinator had already been appointed for the UP police Twitter handle in Britain.
“We have appointed Supriya Broadbent, a London-based Corporate Tax Consultant, as the co-ordinator of our Britain social media accounts. We could have made our Britain handles active, but we wanted to launch at least 14 or 15 of them at once,” he said.
Srivastava added that they would soon invite applicants for other handles, and that Oman could soon have a UP police
account.
Ambassador approves
India’s ambassador to Oman, Indra Mani Pandey, said that the move was a welcome one, as it helped the Uttar Pradesh police co-ordinate directly with citizens.
“Any mechanism that helps Indian citizens receive help from authorities is, of course, a good idea. Moreover, the fact that the initiative allows citizens to interact directly with the police makes it very useful,” Pandey said.
A Uttar Pradesh domicile expat, Manisha Dixit, said that the initiative would be helpful. Dixit added that she had earlier faced problems with a police case in Lucknow while she was residing in Muscat.
“Hopefully, this Twitter handle will help people from UP in Oman. I had no such help when I was distressed. About five years ago, we had rented our bungalow in Lucknow to an advocate. He didn’t pay us rent for a long time. So, we asked him to vacate the house, but he refused.
“We filed cases against him and he filed counter-cases against us. We had all the necessary paperwork for the house. I had travelled back to Lucknow, lived there for months and ran from one office to another to get our house back, but couldn’t. Last year, we had to sell our house to the advocate for a much lower price.”
“Buying property and holding on to it is very difficult for NRIs. Hopefully, this initiative by the Uttar Pradesh police will help,” Dixit said.
