After project Sukanya's success, colleges approach Howrah cops to train girl students in self defence

Kolkata: After the immense success of project Sukanya in schools in Howrah, administration of colleges have approached the Howrah City Police with a request to arrange self defence training courses under the project for college-goers as well.

It may be mentioned that project Sukanya is a brainchild of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to provide self defence training to school-goers. The project was first taken up by the Kolkata Police a few years ago and they have successfully imparted training to thousands of girl students from different schools and some colleges in the city.

The project was also later taken up by three other police commissionerates – Howrah City Police, Bidhannagar City Police and Barrackpore Police Commissionerate — in July.

In the first phase, the Howrah City Police are imparting self defence training to 200 girl students from 10 schools. A senior police officer said that 20 girl students from each of the 10 schools undertake training for two days in a week. On each day, the training classes go on for around one and a half hour.

According to the sources, after witnessing the success of the project in schools in Howrah, administration of Narasinha Dutt College has approached the police commissinerate to arrange training for girl students of their institution as well.

The police officer said that there the college authorities had preliminary discussion with them in this regard and they will be giving a letter soon in this connection.

Each session of the training programme is of 90 days and the ongoing session with 200 students from schools is going to end in the beginning of January and the second session will start after that. So, there are possibilities of bringing college-goers under the self defence training programme from January itself. The discussion in this regard is on, the officer said.

It may be mentioned that each of the participants get a certificate for undertaking the self defence training course.

Meanwhile, the police station level matches of the MP Cup, which is a school-level football tournament with teams from schools under 18 police stations situated in the area under the jurisdiction of Howrah Lok Sabha constituency, is also going to end by November 12. Prasun Banerjee is the MP of Howrah. Each team from the 18 police stations and the last year's winner and runners up will be participating in the final level of the tournament.