By IANS,
Chandigarh: Gun-crazy Punjab has seen over 120,000 licensed weapons being deposited by their owners with the police before the parliamentary elections – a five-times increase over the previous polls.
“An important aspect of this election is that against 21,000 weapons got deposited during the last election, 1.20 lakh (120,000) weapons have been deposited during current Lok Sabha election. It is because of these preventive measures that no incident of violence has been reported so far in the state,” Director General of Police K.K. Attri said here Tuesday.
The DGP said that over 6,200 preventive arrests have been made in Punjab while the Punjab police have executed another 6,403 non-bailable warrants.
Attri said that the state police were keeping a strict check on sale, production and storage of drugs and other intoxicants and for the first time a task force under the command of an inspector general of police (IGP) has been given this task.
Polling in Punjab’s 13 parliamentary seats takes place in two phases – four seats on Thursday (May 7) and nine seats on May 13.
Over 62,000 police personnel, including 46 companies of paramilitary forces, will maintain law and order during polling Thursday. The state has 11,978 polling stations.
Five constituencies, Patiala, Bathinda, Amritsar, Gurdaspur and Khadoor Sahib, have been declared hyper-sensitive.