Punjab State Scheduled Castes Commission on Tuesday set a three-month deadline for the state police chief to decide the pending cases, up to 2016.

The directions were issue by the Commission’s chairperson Tejinder Kaur while presiding over a meeting to review the pending cases pertaining to various departments.

The chairperson, reviewing the pending cases concerning the Police Department, directed the state Director General of Police (DGP) Dinkar Gupta to decide with regard to the pending cases up to 2016 falling under SC/ST Act within three months, besides completing the probe concerning the cases up to 2017 in six months’ time.

She also sought detailed report about the entire lot of pending cases from the Department.

The chairperson also directed that the progress pertaining to the cases under the SC/ST community be evaluated every week. At the same time, pointing out many flaws in the SC/ST cases on the part of the investigating officers, the chairperson emphasized upon the DGP to provide adequate training to all such officers.

DGP Gupta assured the Commission that proper measures would be put in place to implement in letter and spirit the directions of the commission.

During the meeting, various schemes such as Aashirwad, post-matric scholarship were also evaluated with instructions being issued to the officers of the concerned department to present report of the previous five years regarding these two schemes in a week’s time.

The meeting also saw two proposals being presented by the ex-officio member Gian Chand Deewali regarding increasing the income level from Rs 2.50 lakh to Rs eight lakh as for general category in order to enable the SC/ST community to benefit from the Government schemes and increasing the waived credit limit for the loan availed by the SC/ST community on the pattern of the farmers debt waiver, from Rs 20,000 to Rs one lakh. Both the proposals were accepted unanimously.