Sports patrol

How athletes-turned-policemen are playing their part to enforce the lockdown and keep India safe

- NEERU BHATIA

ON REGULAR DAYS, Akhil Kumar meets his staff at his Traffic Tower office in DLF phase IV, Gurugram. The assistant commissioner of police (traffic), in charge of posh east Gurugram, then assesses the situation on the 30km stretch of the Delhi-Jaipur highway that comes under him.

But these are not regular days. The boxer, who won gold at the 2006 Commonwealth Games, has his hands full. He has to ensure that people do not hit the roads unnecessarily during the nationwide lockdown.

The initial days were especially tough, and Kumar spent endless hours trying to manage the migrant workers who were walking home to their villages. “People were getting information from various verified and unverified sources,” he told THE WEEK. “It was not just the poor and the uneducated who were defying the lockdown, even the so-called educated were flouting norms.”

While he could be stern with the educated rich, Kumar found himself helpless while dealing with the poor. “You try explaining to the migrants that this is being done for their own good, but how much can you convince them?” he asked. “We had directives to not use any force with the migrating public or speak rudely to them. However, once we were told to ensure that the movement was stopped, we had to be firm. After the first few days, things smoothed out.”

With his focus on the streets, Kumar now finds barely any time to spend with his wife and daughter. Neither do his colleagues, who sometimes stay at work for 10 days at a stretch rather than take the risk of spreading infection by going home.