There are three dedication plaques in this compound — one in the entrance porch and one on each of the two statues outside. Between them they settle four things about the museum, and three of those four contradict what is published about it online.
We read them off photographs, cropped from the full-resolution originals. Here is what they say.
The porch: 10 May 1999
SARDAR VALLABHBHAI PATEL POLICE MUSEUM. INAUGURATED BY Shri. B. S. Sastry IPS, Director General of Police, Kerala State, ON 10th MAY 1999. IN THE PRESENCE OF Shri. R. K. Medhekar IPS, I.G.P. South Zone; Shri. Paul Leslie IPS, D.I.G. Trivandrum Range; Smt. B. Sandhya IPS, S.P. Kollam.
The date agrees with the English Wikipedia infobox. Everything else on that plaque is information you cannot get anywhere else: no travel source we found names B. S. Sastry, the Director General of Police who actually opened the place.
The rank that everybody gets wrong
Every travel page about this museum says some version of the same sentence: it was the brainchild of the then Inspector General of Police, B. Sandhya IPS, who wanted to share the history of the Kerala Police with the public.
The plaque records her as S.P. Kollam — Superintendent of Police for the district.
Her published service record settles it beyond argument. B. Sandhya joined the IPS in 1988. She was SP Kollam from 1998 to 1999, which is precisely when this museum was founded, and again earlier in 1994–95. She became an Inspector General only in 2007, eight years after the ribbon was cut, and went on to Additional DGP and then Director-General of the Kerala Fire and Rescue Services before retiring in 2023.
So the attribution is almost certainly correct and the rank is not. This is a common shape of error and worth naming: a person’s highest or best-known rank gets read backwards onto an earlier posting, and then copied. It also makes the story slightly better than the version in circulation. A serving district SP getting a museum built is a more interesting fact than a zonal Inspector General doing it.
And the attribution fits her independently. She is recorded as having conceptualised a Kerala Police history website and edited a short history of the force, so a documented interest in the department’s past runs through her career.
The statues: 25 January 2006
Outside stand two black figures on plinths — Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, upright and holding a book, and Gandhi, seated cross-legged on a white plinth. Each has a plaque.
Patel’s reads: This statue was unveiled by Shri. T.P. Senkumar IPS, IGP (SZ), On 25th January 2006, In The Presence of Shri. Anil Kant IPS (DIG Tvpm Range); Shri. A. R. Santhosh Varma IPS (SP Kollam & President, Police Museum); Shri. M. N. Jayaprakash (DySP, Kollam); Shri. N. A. Rasheed (CI Kollam East & Secretary, Police Museum). Gandhi’s carries the same officer and the same date, and adds an artist: Sri. A. Ashok Kumar.
The English Wikipedia article, and the travel pages that follow it, date the Patel statue to January 2005. Both plinths say 25 January 2006. The plinths win.
One more distinction worth keeping straight, because the two are easily run together. Wikipedia describes the Patel statue as 1.1 tons of concrete sculpted by a police constable named Santosh — that attribution is Wikipedia’s, not the plinth’s, and it applies to the Patel figure. The Gandhi statue’s own plaque credits a different artist entirely.
The thing the plaques let slip
The 2006 plaque names an SP as President, Police Museum and a Circle Inspector as Secretary, Police Museum.
That is a governance fact stated on no website we could find: the museum is run by a committee or society with officers, not directly as a department directorate. It explains a good deal — the modest scale, the twenty-rupee ticket, the fact that it has quietly kept going for a quarter of a century — and it is the kind of detail that only ever turns up because somebody photographed a plinth.
And the spelling
The plaques, the porch sign and the board at the gate all read Vallabhbhai, as does the English Wikipedia article. The Wikimedia Commons filenames, DTPC Kollam and Kerala Tourism all read Vallabhai. We follow the building.
Frequently asked questions
Who really founded the museum?
The plaque records it as inaugurated by Shri B. S. Sastry IPS, Director General of Police, Kerala State, on 10 May 1999, in the presence of R. K. Medhekar IPS (IGP South Zone), Paul Leslie IPS (DIG Trivandrum Range) and B. Sandhya IPS (SP Kollam). The idea is widely and plausibly credited to B. Sandhya — but as Superintendent of Police, Kollam, which is what she was in 1999, not as an Inspector General, which she became in 2007.
When were the statues unveiled?
25 January 2006, both of them, by T. P. Senkumar IPS, then IGP (South Zone) — the date is on both plinths. English Wikipedia and the pages following it say January 2005.
Who runs the museum?
A committee, on the evidence of the 2006 plaque, which lists the Superintendent of Police, Kollam as President of the Police Museum and the Circle Inspector, Kollam East as its Secretary. No website we found states this.