The Missing Policeman

To put this in perspective: India already has one of the lowest police-to-population ratios in the world. Against a UN-mandated international norm of 222 policemen per lakh of population, India barely has 143 8212; this works out to just 14,000 police stations for more than 6.5 lakh villages. In most Western countries, the figure is between 250 and 500. Italy and Mexico, two countries with strong presence of underworld and mafia groups, have 559 and 492 policemen per lakh of their population. This, when India routinely ranks at the top of the charts when it comes to casualties of terror and insurgency 8212; and the overall incidence of crime is a whopping 400-plus per lakh population.

More disturbing is the fact that states worst-affected by insurgency or Naxal-related viole8212;ce iquest; and, typically, states with problems of infrastructure and connecti8212;ity iquest; are the ones with maximum numbers of unfilled police posts. Examples: Assam, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. See Box

Former Director General of BSF Prakash Singh, whose public interest petition in the Supreme Court initiated a major reform process of the state police forces, blames the huge number of vacancies to 8220;sheer incompetence8221; of the state governments.

8220;There can be no excuse for not filling up these vacancies,8221; he says. 8220;The blame has to lie squarely with state governments. Instead of always asking for Central help in the form of paramilitary assistance, states should build their own resources.8221;

In many states, recruitments have not happened for several years now. Chhattisgarh, one of the worst-affected states because of Naxal violence, started a normal recruitment process in 2004 after years of near-freeze. But the backlog is so huge that almost half of the posts are still vacant. As of now, Chhattisgarh has about 7,000 vacancies despite the state police relaxing norms in the recruitment and promotion of police officers to accommodate more personnel.

8220;From the start of the 8216;90s when Chhattisgarh was still part of Madhya Pradesh, to 2004, very few recruitments had been made in the state police forces. The problem became even more acute because of the rule that ensures that a post lapses if it remains vacant for five continuous years. A number of sanctioned police posts got abolished in this manner,8221; says state DGP Vishwa Ranjan.

The case of Jharkhand, which has close to 9,000 vacancies, is even more curious. The state recently put a temporary freeze on the recruitment of police personnel pending a change in rules that gives disproportionate weightage to the height of an applicant. 8220;We have submitted a proposal to change the recruitment rules. It is likely to happen very soon after which the normal recruitment process will start,8221; says Director General of Police, Jharkhand, V D Ram.

Like his Chhattisgarh colleague, Ram attributes the large number of vacancies to 8220;dry8221; periods in previous years during which very few people had been hired.

With the recent terror strikes in Ahmedabad and Delhi bringing back the focus on the shortage of policemen, the Centre sanctioned 7,612 new police posts for Delhi. But as Prakash Singh points out, these are more in the nature of ad-hoc arrangements. 8220;Police forces in India are a neglected lot. They take all the bricks and never get any bouquets. It needs a systemic overhaul.8221;

But this is only part of the problem.

The case for a systemic overhaul can be best understood from the fact that a con8212;tableiquest;the crucial link in the human intelligence chain in the traditional beat constable system of po8212;icing iquest; is, in terms of salary, considered equivalent to an unskilled worker like a peon. This, despite the fact that under the Criminal Procedure Code, a constable has all the powers of a police officer, including arresting, registering a case, issuing a challan, verifying court papers and looking into other judicial papers.

Police is a non-developmental state subject, and is, therefore, perennially short of funds. A large number of police stations are without buildings, vehicles, telephones, the Internet, etc, and short of stationery and vehicle fuel.