UNDERSTAFFED INDIAN POLICE FORCE

The statistics for number of Police personnel per lakh of population throws up an interesting question “Are Indians living in much PEACEFUL, SAFER and LOW CRIME society since it has less than half of the internal security force as compared to the most advance countries in the world, which have most advanced and sophisticated safety systems and crime regulations?”.

Country	Number of Police Personnel Per Lakh of Population	Global Peace Index Rankings in 2011 (out of the 153 Countries Assessed)	Homicide Rate Per Lakh Of Population per year in 2011.
The United States	233	82	4.8
Germany	301	15	0.84
The United Kingdom	333	26	1.23
France	369	36	1.09
India	131	135	3.4
Note: 1 Lakh is equivalent to 100,000 or 10% of a million.

However, the ground reality based on reputed International organization’s studies paints a totally different picture of India.

Internal Security forces are utilized for a wide ranging normal security operations like regulating law & order, VIP protection, election security (Of late, elections in India to various tiers of democracy are being held in phases and for longer durations and has almost become a perennial phenomenon.), traffic regulations etc.   Over and above the normal operations, police forces are deployed to tackle special security issues such as, security and combing operations in Naxal infected areas, foiling Terrorist attacks, managing social unrest fuelled by caste-ist forces, religious forces, regionalism, Anti-capitalist forces etc.

Increasing deployment of security forces for VIP’s protection coupled with deployment requirements for tackling insurgent, naxal and terrorist activities have strained the already limited police forces. 

A report, prepared by Bureau of Police Research and Development, said as on January 1, 2011, the actual strength of the police personnel for per lakh population was 131.39 against the sanctioned posts of 173.51. The report, released by Federal Home Minister P Chidambaram in April 2012, said manpower for protected persons’ protection duty is drawn from available resources generally without corresponding increase in sanctioned strength for the purpose.

Nonetheless, the total police-population ratio (total sanctioned number of police personnel available for per lakh population) has shown wide variations across the country. Intriguingly, the most populous states have relatively much less sanctioned strength of police men than warranted by their total population. West Bengal has just 81 police personnel for per lakh population, followed by 88 personnel in Bihar, 115 in Madhya Pradesh and 118 in Rajasthan against the national average of 174 policemen for per lakh population. Contrarily, sparsely populated states like Tripura have 1,124, Manipur has 1,147 and Mizoram has 1,112 police personnel per lakh population.

Hence, the following measures are immediately warranted by the government to justly meet the law & order situations of ever exploding population, increasing internal security threats, VIP protection requirements and social unrest.

ü  Immediate recruitment and training to meet the sanctioned strength requirements.

ü  Correcting the anomalies in the wide variations of sanctioned strength of the states across the country.

ü  Reviewing the sanctioned strength criteria periodically vis-à-vis deployment requirements.

 With increasing unemployment in India and passion in the younger generation for secured government jobs, it is perplexing to notice the delays in recruitment.

The argument of additional pressure on the exchequer due to increase of security forces may not hold much ice since, peace and harmony with in the country can act as a catalyst for the country’s economic development, thus yielding indirect social and financial benefits to the government and the citizens.

To supplement the above corollary, Stern Review noted that, if the world was 25% more peaceful in 2011, an additional economic benefit of just over US$2 trillion could have been accrued.