Patnaik favourite for top cop post

He has been serving as Additional Director General (traffic) for the past four years.

An announcement is expected soon as many top posts will see changes once the current Director General of Police D Sivanandhan retires on Monday.

Sanjeev Dayal,the Commissioner of Police (Mumbai) will soon be elevated to DG rank and will be transferred to a state posting.

The only other contender after Patnaik happens to be former Pune Commissioner Satyapal Singh from the 1980 batch. Three senior officers from the 1977 batch,contemporaries to Dayal,missed an opportunity to become the commissioner of police as they have now been posted to other positions.

P N Dixit,Principal Secretary (Home) and Raj Khilnani,Additional Director General (Railways),both from the 1977 batch,are two such officers. Three other senior officers from the batch of 1978 have already retired,making Patnaik the obvious contender.

Patnaik,the only direct Indian Police Service recruit of 1979,has the longest city innings among all the senior officers.

His first posting was in Latur after which he moved to Jalgaon,Nagpur before moving to his first city post as the then Zone 6 Deputy Commissioner of Police.

Known for his tireless campaign against night bars in Khar,Bandra and Andheri in the late 80s,he soon built a reputation for himself. Patnaik was soon given a deputation post in the Central Bureau of Investigation where he was promoted to the rank of Deputy Inspector General in 1995.

He moved back to active city policing in 1999 when he was made the Additional Commissioner of Police for the most prominent South Region before being moved to an SRPF post where he was promoted as Special Inspector General.

In 2005,Patnaik finally came to one of the most important city postings as Joint commissioner Police (law and order) and continued to have a ‘good spell’. He is known to have handled the field single handedly on the night of July 2006 serial blasts.

The only blot on his career came in 2007-2008 when CID had intervened and alleged that Patnaik had allegedly made a false complaint against a local builder.