Patna’s Dabangg cop goes ‘viral’

PATNA: IPS officer Shivdeep Wamanrao Lande is not into social networking. Facebook, however, until recently had numerous accounts and pages in the name of this popular Bihar cadre officer. Worse, at least one of these fake accounts was used to dupe a Jaipur girl of Rs 51,000.
These fake accounts surfaced in an arguable tribute to Lande’s popularity. One such fraudster calling himself Wamanrao Lande got into a Facebook chat with the Jaipur girl and got her to part with Rs 51,000 as her contribution to his “social” work.After the girl approached Lande asking why he had stopped chatting with her despite her contribution, the IPS officer got Wamanrao FB account probed.
Cops have now frozen the bank account to which the girl had transferred the money, which belongs to one Gopal Krishna of Daudnagar in Bihar’s Aurangabad district. As a matter of fact, several such fake FB accounts have been deactivated after the Gopal Krishna fraud was reported.
Lande’s is not a run-of-the-mill story. Patna had erupted in protests three years ago when he was transferred as Patna SP 10 months after posting; his proactive and no-nonsense policing had made him hugely popular.
Lande led several raids on illegal trade of spurious drugs, cosmetics, edible items and shady cyber-cafes. He is known to take calls on phone at any hour and acts promptly on complaints. Eve teasers land behind bars even as young women take a shine on Bihar’s supercop: their knight in shining armour.
“Sweetheart, your style of functioning resembles my style of thinking. Whenever you do a good job, I get congratulations. For, my friends know you are mine,” read one of the many marriage proposals texted to him.
Maharashtra born, Lande had an arranged marriage with Gauri, a gynaecologist from his home state, in February 2014. Although not into social networking, this engineering graduate who quit the Indian Revenue Service to join the IPS in 2006 is involved in a number of social activities. He and one of his friends founded a Yuvak Sangathan in his home district of Akola after joining the IRS in 2004, and it has 70,000-odd members.
Lande donates half his salary to the Sangathan which organizes mass weddings of poor girls and runs coaching classes and a hostel for poor students to help them “realize their dreams”. The initiative has employed scores of young men.