The Kerala Police have put the staff of five police stations on an eight-hour working day and intend to introduce the scheme in seventeen more. A humane and progressive measure, on the face of it, but one that is unlikely to work in India. Rajiv Gandhi put the central government on a five-day working week, and that historic blunder is yet to be corrected. The measure, intended to increase efficiency, achieved nothing in particular. True, the babus who infest Delhi's bhavans goof off less, but only because they have one day less in every week to get their goofing done. In India, Parkinson's Inverse Law simply does not hold good. Work does not shrink to adjust to the time allocated to it.More importantly, some services by their very nature have to be on call twenty-four hours a day. These relate to the very basic need of society: security. Emergency health services, for instance, stay open at all hours. The armed forces are supposed to be ready to respond to external threat at any time. The police, who aresupposed to control internal threats that can harm the social fabric, also fall into this group. The force is anyway not as effective as it ought to be because of chronic manpower shortages. If limited work hours are introduced, it will be even less responsive to public needs. For instance, the police regularly find excuses not to file an FIR or to simply to look the other way. Now, there will be fewer demands on their creative faculty. For half the day, they would have a valid reason instead of an excuse: `Sorry, off duty'. The flip side of this argument is the word governments that need to scrape the bottom of the barrel to pay their wage bills have come to dread: overtime. If policemen are required to work outside of fixed hours, surely they need to be compensated for it. One wonders if the Nayanar government in Kerala has considered this very sobering aspect of its policy.Maintaining a police force that works to a specified schedule is like maintaining an army which is prepared to fight only duringoffice hours. The Mahabharata and the Old Testament inform us that there is indeed a precedent for such a regime, but it seems to have worked only in the dim and distant past, at a time when everyone was strong on etiquette and integrity and knew when to lay off. In the notably impolite modern age, it would be unrealistic to expect that the ungodly shall gallantly declare a moratorium on further evil the moment the policemen they are engaging with down lathis for the day. Instead of looking to ideal solutions for an ideal world, the government of Kerala might try to address the basic problems that have given the police a bad name: inadequate pay, poor prospects, no growth opportunities at the lower level and an antediluvian system of work. It is these factors that have robbed the police of all self-esteem and rendered them ineffectual. Reducing time spent on the job will not help cure any of them. It is, in fact, a cosmetic gesture which will see their inefficiency plumbing new depths.
