While the Police department claims that it had abolished the orderly system in 1979 through a government order, a reply to an RTI enquiry has revealed that even retired senior officials still enjoy the services of orderlies.

A list from the police headquarters show that as many as 55 retired senior officials, from the ranks of DGP to IG, still use orderlies at their homes apart from hundreds of serving officers.

“Even for us, sitting in the headquarters, it has been a difficult process to keep track on orderlies, because orderlies are never officially sanctioned. So the list may not be complete,” a senior police official disclosed.

In the reply to the RTI application filed by city-based activist Mr V. Gopalakrishnan, it was initially said that the orderly system was abolished in the year 1979.

But the reply also attached a list of officials as an answer to the question of details of retired senior officials who were enjoying the services of orderlies.

The list showed that as many as 22 retired Directors General of Police, 16 retired Additional Director Generals of Police and 17 retired Inspectors General of Police still had men or women from the police constabulary at their disposal to do menial jobs at their homes.

Following is the list of retired officials provided by the PIO at the DGP’s office. When contacted PIO, inspector general Mohamed Shakeel Akhter claimed that officially there were no orderlies. When asked about the list given as reply to the RTI query about the retired officials availing orderlies, he said it could be a mix up.

List of retired DGs:

Dr R K Raghavan, P C Pant, A Ravindranath, V K Rajagopalan, S Ganapathy, Dr. R.Rajagopalan, S.Kumaraswamy, S Ramani, S V Venkatakrishnan, D Mukherjee, P. Rajendran, Paramvir Singh, S P Mathur, K. Natarajan, Jagan M Sheshadri, K V S Goplakrishnan, K P Jain, V. Balachandran, N Balachandran, R Nataraj, G Thilakavathi and Vibhakar Sharma.

List of retired ADGPs:

E Hariharane, G Veeraraghavan, V C Perumal, P L Viswanathan, R V Gopalan, D Manoharan, K Ramalingam, V Chandrakishore, P Thangarajan, KVS Murthy, R N Sawani, G Nanchil Kumaran, A Subramanian, C V Rao, K Rajendran and Sarabjith Singh

List of IGPs:

K Vadivelu, N Appadurai, K Subbiah, V Jaganathan, V Ramarajan, D Radhakrishan, C Balasubramaniam, M Balachandran, S Ramanathan, A Kalimulah Khan, M Chidambaraswamy, AP Mohamed Ali, R Ramarajan, G Umaganapathy Sastry, Christopher Nelson, N Chenbaharaman, and G Dorairaj.

Sources said that some officials ask men from the department to polish their shoes, take care of their dogs and even make pickles at home, thus treating the orderlies like slaves.

“Yes, a GO dated September 9, 1979 by the Tamil Nadu government had abolished the orderly system officially.

But the police officials had been somehow finding a way to get orderlies deployed at their houses.

Usually the officials ask the local police station or special units to send men home to do their personal work.

Unless all units and police stations inform about orderly deployment to a single cell, which does not exist, it is very difficult to get the details of orderlies used by police officials,” confessed an official.