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Delhi Police has asked Delhi University for land to replace Maurice Nagar police station’s crumbling tin-roofed building, citing rising security needs for students, especially women, in DU’s North Campus.

Maurice Nagar police station, tucked inside DU’s North Campus is still running out of a “temporary” tin-roofed structure, one that may have just outlasted its shelf life. A distance of merely 500 metres from Miranda House college and SRCC, students who walk into the police station to report a stolen phone, a harassment complaint, or scuffles during college fests and DUSU elections sit amidst damp ceilings and peeling doors.

Delhi Police has now formally asked Delhi University, which owns the land, to allot space for a permanent building. In at least two letters to vice-chancellor Yogesh Singh over the past three months, police, including DCP (north) Raja Banthia, have stressed that growing security needs, especially for women students on campus, make a permanent structure “essential.”

A committee has reportedly identified two possible plots and shared them informally with DU, but officials say they’re yet to receive a response. The Land & Development Office was approached first but had no suitable plot available, pushing the matter up to Delhi Police headquarters. Notably, the lease for the existing structure was extended in April by another decade, through 2034, even as the push for a new building continues.

Built in 2004 after being shifted from Bonta Park (where it operated since 1988), the station sits on 944 square yards beside the Najafgarh drain, a spot that has widely been flagged as hazardous once the monsoon sets in and the drain swells. In addition to that, a recent spell of rain exposed just how badly the building itself has deteriorated; with the tin roof letting water through in multiple spots, moisture stains spreading across the plaster, and some wooden doors reduced to broken frames with flaking paint.

A police officer who has spent two years posted at the police station in question, in conversation with the Hindustan Times, warned that the leaks pose a genuine hazard to the computer equipment kept in two rooms, potentially triggering electrical faults.

Crowd management is another sore point. With no proper seating area set aside for the public, people filing complaints end up perched on benches by the entrance or squeezed onto the low wall ringing a small patch of green inside the compound, an arrangement that one officer claims becomes an inefficient workspace during times of higher footfall, during the DUSU election season or the university’s annual fests, for example.

Image Source: The Indian Express

Manya Marwah

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