Planning for Ganesh bandobast almost like ISRO’s rocket launch: Anjani Kumar

Hyderabad: The Ganesh immersion procession, one of the city’s most celebrated events, could never have been more challenging than this year. A full-fledged procession unlike last year’s curtailed event, even when the pandemic hung like a cloud over the city, the threat of rains, Supreme Court guidelines and then, the security threats in a capital […]

Hyderabad: The Ganesh immersion procession, one of the city’s most celebrated events, could never have been more challenging than this year. A full-fledged procession unlike last year’s curtailed event, even when the pandemic hung like a cloud over the city, the threat of rains, Supreme Court guidelines and then, the security threats in a capital city – the Hyderabad City Police had their hands full and yet, pulled it off with a peaceful, incident-free procession and immersion.

City Police Commissioner Anjani Kumar credits the success to precise planning and execution with support of the force and other departments, adding that the planning was almost on the lines of that for a rocket launch by the Indian Space Research Organization.

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“Ganesh immersion has always been a litmus test for the police. In Hyderabad, it’s rated as the most challenging bandobast during the year,” he told Telangana Today a day after the main procession.

Though the main procession is from Chandrayangutta to the Hussain Sagar, there were 36 tributary processions connecting to it from various corners of the city. The preparation started over 40 days ago with multiple physical and virtual coordination meetings. “Though Tank Bund is the epicenter, for the first time this year, we had three directions for immersion – Upper Tank Bund, NTR Marg and PVNR Marg. About 14,000 idols above four feet were geo-tagged, which made a total of 27,000 idols,” Anjani Kumar said.

Special arrangements had to be made for the immersion of the gigantic Ganesh idols from Khairatabad and Balapur too. “The shifting of the Khairatabad Ganesh from its installation place to the truck and the 2.6km journey was a herculean task. It required precision, team work and coordination of the highest order. The organizers, welders, crane operators, truck drivers all had to work in perfect coordination,” the Commissioner said.

For the incident-free event, the Commissioner, who is monitoring the proceedings from the Control Room without going home since Sunday, credited multiple level of anti-sabotage checking with 90 sabotage teams and 25 sniffer canines and the Special Branch. Nearly 300 highly sensitive and sensitive areas were identified and senior cops were deployed to see everything went off smoothly.

The success of teamwork is how Anjani Kumar sums it up.

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