The Kerala government is planning to extend a student police project, currently running in schools, to colleges in the state in an effort to contain extremism and drug use and instill positive qualities among the students.
The Government Law College in Thiruvananthapuram will be the first to get a unit of Students’ Police Cadet.
The project is meant to empower the youth in resisting the growth of negative tendencies such as “social intolerance, substance abuse, deviant behavior, and anti-establishment violence”, according to the project website.
The SPC strives to create safe school and college environments and the creation of a confident youth willing to react against social evils, and find solutions to community problems.
It also aims to create a “strong relationship” between the police and the community.
While violence has always been a hallmark of Kerala college politics, the campuses have seen the rise of extremism in the last two decades, creating a headache for law-enforcement agencies.
Colleges currently have NCC or National Cadet Corps and NSS or National Service Scheme. The former is aimed at instilling discipline and patriotism among students, while the latter is focused on social service. Neither are used for maintaining law and order.
There will be two SPC units in Gov. law college with 22 male and female students in each units.
The units will include first year students to ensure at least two years of experience for all students.
The Student Police Cadet project was founded in 2010 as a school-based youth development initiative.
Its aims including training high-school students to evolve as future leaders and to nurture respect for the law, discipline, civic sense and resistance to social evils.
The project is also supposed to nurture “commitment in students towards their family, the community, and the larger society.”
Primarily envisaged as a permanent school level police youth liaison mechanism, the SPC has managed to increase the number of SPC schools and cadets undergoing training over the years.
There are 52,000 SPC cadets across 645 schools at present.