Beary among local language skills for police in city

Mangalore Today News Network

Aug 01, 2016: With Tulu under their hats, now select personnel of Mangaluru City Police are moving on to another local language - Beary. With Tulu, Beary, and Konkani the lingua franca in this part of the state in addition to Kannada, knowledge of these languages is advantage for the police  to be on top of the happenings in their surroundings and communicate with the people in a language they are comfortable with rather than in Kannada or a language that men in khaki use.

The latest training programmes that got underway to expose police constables, whom city police chief M Chandra Sekhar believes are the cutting edge level of policing operations get to know the nuances of the language. "Open recruitment to police force sees candidates from across the state make it to different policing units and each region in the state has its own diversity in terms of language, food and culture. Here we are addressing language issue," he said.

K M Shantharaju, deputy commissioner of police (law and order) said the present batch of police personnel - 34 in all, including a police inspector who are learning Beary language are those from Dakshina Kannada district whose mother tongue is Tulu or are conversant in Tulu, but who do not know Tulu. "In the first phase, we taught Tulu to those police constables who have been drafted in to the city police unit from other districts where Tulu is not in vogue," he said.  Now it is the turn of Beary and next may be Konkani.