Kolkata Police has floated an ₹89 lakh tender to dress nearly 20,000 non-police volunteers in saffron full-sleeve T-shirts and matching peak caps for Durga Puja crowd and traffic duty, replacing the navy-blue T-shirts and caps that have long marked the city’s temporary festive force.
Lalbazar’s notice covers 12,000 deep-saffron and 8,000 light-saffron collared shirts, each carrying the Kolkata Police logo in white and the words “Kolkata Police Volunteer” on the front and back. Orange peak caps complete the kit. Of the total outlay, about ₹73 lakh is earmarked for the garments and ₹16 lakh for the caps. Technical and financial bids close on September 30, with an earnest-money deposit of ₹1.8 lakh.
The volunteers - NCC cadets, scouts, civil defence workers, students and members of local NGOs - will be posted from Tritiya through Dashami at intersections, Metro gates, pandal approaches and other choke points. Their brief is familiar: keep pedestrian streams moving, help lost children and the elderly, flag medical emergencies and report eve-teasing or bottlenecks.
A senior officer at Lalbazar said the colour is first an operational choice. “During the week-long festivities, arterial roads turn into human oceans. Quick identification of support staff becomes difficult. Bright orange apparel lets citizens, motorists and lost children spot help from a distance,” the officer said.
The change also sits inside a larger visual shift in the city since the change of government in May. Government buildings, secretariat signage, state-run buses, barricades and several public installations that once wore the previous regime’s blue-and-white palette have been painted or lit in saffron and related shades. The volunteer kit is the latest element of that citywide makeover to reach the streets during Bengal’s biggest festival.
Officials insist the new uniforms are meant for comfort on long shifts as much as for visibility: full sleeves and collars instead of the older half-sleeve navy T-shirts. Real-time crowd and diversion updates will continue to be fed to FM radio so revellers can plan routes.
Whether the saffron kits will make volunteers easier to find in the crush of pandals remains to be seen on the ground. What is already clear is that this year’s Puja streets will look different from the last - from the paint on civic structures to the shirts on the young men and women directing the crowds.
