After losing its personnel, including senior officers, to bullets of terrorists — some of them allegedly due to inadequate protection — the police force in the state has woken up to the urgent need for bulletproof vests that work.

Now the state police have decided to go in for a fresh supply of bulletproof jackets, significantly after a gap of four years.

Speaking to The Indian Express, Shrickant Tarawade, Assistant Inspector General of Police, said from Mumbai, “I will not give the exact figure or the date for the purchase of bulletproof jackets, but the process has been initiated and we plan to get them by next year. The state police plan to provide these jackets in almost all district police headquarters.”

There is already an increase in demand for bulletproof jackets from various parts of the country at a time when there is severe shortage of raw material required for manufacturing these vests, imported from United States, said Rahul More, proprietor of Dombivili-based agency, Magna Era, leading supplier of bulletproof jackets in this part of the country.

“There was a big demand from police personnel who were procuring them on their own while the terrorist attack on Mumbai was on. In fact there were many members of the media who were in the market for these vests. We cannot meet such demand at short notice as production is done as per projections made on a long-term basis. In other words, bulletproof vests were not available for sale off the shelf,” he said.

Magna Era has been supplying bulletproof jackets to police force of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.

“The delay in procuring jackets by Maharashtra Police is that it has been sitting on the proposal for too long,” he said.

While admitting there had been too long a gap in purchasing the bulletproof vests, Tarawade pointed to a paucity of good quality jackets for the delay.

According to Tarawade, the state police get the jackets tested at Terminal Ballistics Research Laboratory (TBRL) of the Defence Research and Development Organisation laboratory in Chandigarh and some of the samples tried out by them had failed the quality tests.

Ravindra Sengaonkar, DCP (special branch), Pune Police said the shortage of bulletproof jackets was a reality, but at the same time they could not go in for sub-standard equipment.

Meanwhile, these bulletproof vests that cost around Rs 25,000 per piece, has been seeing an unprecedented rise in demand, even before the Mumbai terror strike.

The rise in demand from civilians has come mostly from politicians and builders, said More.

Bulletproof jackets are sold after police verification to ensure they do not fall into the hands of the wrong persons, especially Naxalites, he added.

There are some seven manufacturing companies in India, each with a capacity to turn out 60,000 jackets per year.

Various international companies from Israel, China, United States, Taiwan and Europe already have their footprint in the country, though they much costlier than the Made in India versions.