State Police and Police Reforms

This is the section on which every other section in the chapter depends. Police is the first responder to every internal security problem, and the entire elaborate superstructure above it — CAPFs, central agencies, special statutes, the armed forces in aid of civil power — exists to compensate for what the State police cannot do. Every deployment of a central force is, in one sense, a report on the condition of the local police.

Two consequences follow, and they should frame the whole section.

• First, the way to reduce reliance on exceptional powers and central forces is to build ordinary police capacity — the argument closing the treatment of the armed forces.
• Second, and less obviously: in a democracy, ground‑level intelligence comes from the public. The central intelligence architecture can distribute what has been collected, but collection begins with a citizen willing to speak to a constable. Where the police are feared or distrusted, the intelligence pipeline dries up at its source, and no amount of central machinery compensates.

From the Police Act, 1861 to the Model Police Act, 2006

The colonial inheritance

The Police Act, 1861 was enacted immediately after the Revolt of 1857, and its design followed from that timing. It was drawn substantially on the model of the Irish Constabulary — a regime police intended to hold a restive population for a ruler, rather than a civic police intended to serve citizens. Superintendence of the force was vested in the State Government; the district police were placed under the Superintendent subject to the general control of the District Magistrate; and the constabulary was organised as a disciplined, hierarchical body accountable upward rather than outward.

Independent India retained that statute substantially unchanged. This is the fact from which every subsequent problem in this section follows. A force designed to be the instrument of the government over the people was inherited by a constitutional democracy without being redesigned for it, and the accountability structures that would have made it a service rather than an instrument were never built.

The reform record

Body	Recommendations and outcome
National Police Commission (1977–81)	Eight reports — the most comprehensive examination India has conducted. Recommended a new Police Act to replace the 1861 statute, State Security Commissions to insulate the police from illegitimate political direction, fixed tenure for senior officers, and separation of investigation from law and order. Largely unimplemented.
Ribeiro Committee (1998)	Constituted on the Supreme Court’s direction to review implementation of the National Police Commission’s recommendations; reiterated the core of them.
Padmanabhaiah Committee (2000)	Examined police restructuring, recruitment, training, investigation and accountability.
Malimath Committee (2003)	Reform of the criminal justice system as a whole — police, prosecution, courts and prisons together.
Police Act Drafting Committee (Soli Sorabjee Committee)	Produced the Model Police Act, 2006 — a template for States to replace the 1861 Act, recasting the police as a service accountable to the law rather than to the political executive, with a State Police Board, separation of functions, Police Complaints Authorities and community policing built in. A revised Model Police Bill, 2015 was subsequently circulated.

The outcome to state accurately: a number of States have enacted new Police Acts since 2006, but many of them reproduce the 1861 architecture under new labels — retaining executive control over postings and transfers while adopting the vocabulary of the Model Act. The 1861 Act itself continues to apply in some jurisdictions. India has replaced the statute in several States without replacing the design.

Prakash Singh v. Union of India (2006)

Prakash Singh, a former Director General of Police of Uttar Pradesh and Assam, filed a public interest petition in 1996 seeking implementation of the National Police Commission’s recommendations. On 22 September 2006 the Supreme Court delivered judgment and issued seven binding directives to all States and Union territories, to operate until each enacted appropriate legislation.

The seven directives

No.	Directive	Content
1	State Security Commission	Each State to constitute an SSC to lay down broad policy guidelines, evaluate police performance, and act as a buffer against unwarranted political interference. Chaired by the Chief Minister or Home Minister, and to include the Leader of the Opposition, a retired High Court judge and independent members.
2	Selection and tenure of the DGP	The Director General of Police to be selected from among the three senior‑most officers empanelled for promotion by the UPSC, and to have a minimum tenure of two years irrespective of the date of superannuation.
3	Tenure of operational officers	A minimum tenure of two years for officers on operational duties — Inspector General (Zone), Deputy Inspector General (Range), Superintendent of Police (District) and Station House Officer.
4	Separation of investigation from law and order	Investigative and law‑and‑order functions to be separated, at least in towns and urban areas to begin with.
5	Police Establishment Board	A board of serving police officers to decide transfers, postings, promotions and other service matters of officers of and below the rank of Deputy Superintendent, and to make recommendations to the government on higher ranks.
6	Police Complaints Authority	At State level to inquire into allegations of serious misconduct against officers of and above the rank of Superintendent, and at district level for officers up to the rank of Deputy Superintendent.
7	National Security Commission	At the Union level, for the selection and placement of Chiefs of the Central Armed Police Forces and to review their functioning.

COMPLIANCE — THE HONEST POSITION, TWENTY YEARS ON Not a single State has fully complied with all seven directives. Not a single Union territory is compliant either — which means the Central Government is itself in default on directives it is responsible for implementing. On the two directives that matter most for insulation from interference: only around six States provide genuine security of tenure to their police chief, and only around thirteen States have instituted an internal mechanism enabling the police leadership to decide transfers and postings without political direction. Where the bodies exist, they have been hollowed out. Senior officers report that members of Police Establishment Boards are “unofficially” informed of the government’s preferred postings, and that the majority ordinarily aligns with that preference — so the board meets, records a decision, and performs none of the buffer function it was created for. State Security Commissions have commonly been constituted with government nominees, with recommendations made advisory rather than binding, or left unconstituted in practice. Name the pattern: cosmetic compliance. A directive can be satisfied formally and defeated substantively, and that is precisely what has happened. Writing this — rather than “implementation has been poor” — is what distinguishes an informed answer. And explain why, because the reason is not mysterious. The directives attack the single most valuable resource in State administration: control over police transfers and postings. It is the currency of political management at constituency level. No government, of any party, in any State, has been willing to surrender it — which is why two decades of binding Supreme Court directions have produced compliance on paper and very little on the ground.

Second Administrative Reforms Commission — Fifth Report

The Second ARC’s Fifth Report, “Public Order” (2007), remains the most usable single source of reform recommendations for this section. Its principal proposals:

• A new Police Act to replace the statute of 1861, on the reasoning that incremental amendment cannot correct a design fault.
• Separation of investigation from law and order, with a distinct investigative cadre rather than a notional division of duties within the same establishment.
• Insulation from illegitimate political interference — and the Commission was careful to distinguish this from legitimate democratic supervision, which it regarded as necessary. A police force accountable to nobody is as dangerous as one accountable to a party.
• Independent complaints machinery to establish genuine police accountability.
• Strengthening of local policing and structured community involvement.
• Reform of the criminal justice system as a whole — police, prosecution, judiciary and prisons — because improving one component in isolation yields very little.
• Attention to the constabulary — recruitment standards, training, career progression and living and working conditions.
• It recorded expressly that the control exercised by the political executive over the police has been misused to serve personal or political interests.

The systemic point is the one to carry forward. The Commission’s insistence that criminal justice must be reformed as a system connects directly to the pendency and conviction data under the special statutes: better investigation produces nothing if prosecution is under‑resourced and trials take a decade. Police reform proposed in isolation is an incomplete answer, and saying so demonstrates that you have understood the problem rather than memorised a list.

Modernisation

Programme	Content and status
Modernisation of Police Forces / Assistance to States for Modernisation of Police	Central assistance to States for weaponry, mobility, communications, forensic equipment, training infrastructure and police housing. The recurring criticism is not the scheme’s design but under‑utilisation — States frequently fail to draw down or spend the allocation, and the central share is conditional on State matching contributions that are not always forthcoming.
Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS)	A nationwide network connecting police stations for FIR registration, investigation records and a searchable national crime and criminal database. All police stations in the country — over 17,000 — are now connected, which is a genuine and completed achievement. Citizen‑facing services include online complaint filing, verification requests and status tracking.
Inter‑operable Criminal Justice System (ICJS)	Integrates the five pillars of the criminal justice system so that data moves between them without re‑entry: Police (CCTNS), Courts (e‑Courts), Prisons (e‑Prisons), Forensics (e‑Forensics) and Prosecution (e‑Prosecution). Phase II runs from 2022–23 to 2025–26, directed at seamless data exchange and the adoption of analytics and artificial intelligence in policing. This is the Second ARC’s systemic insight given technological form.
Safe City Projects	Funded under the Nirbhaya Fund in major cities — surveillance infrastructure, integrated command and control centres, women’s help desks at police stations, and improved street lighting and transport safety.
Forensic capacity	Expansion of Central and State Forensic Science Laboratories, and the National Forensic Sciences University (NFSU) as a dedicated national institution for forensic education, research and training.

THE LINK MOST ANSWERS MISS Forensic capacity is no longer an aspiration — it is a statutory obligation the system is not yet able to meet. The BNSS, 2023 requires mandatory forensic examination for offences punishable with seven years or more. That obligation applies across the country from the moment the new codes came into force. But the laboratories, equipment and trained personnel to deliver it at that scale do not yet exist. Forensic science laboratories already carry substantial backlogs; mandating forensic examination for every serious offence multiplies the demand without, by itself, creating the supply. The consequence is a real risk: either the requirement is honoured in form and not in substance, or delays in forensic reporting become a fresh cause of pendency in exactly the serious cases the provision was meant to strengthen. A procedural reform that outruns institutional capacity does not improve justice — it relocates the bottleneck. This is among the sharpest available criticisms of the 2023 codes, and it belongs as much to the legal architecture as it does here.

The Numbers, and the Separation Question

Police–population ratio

• The commonly cited international benchmark is around 222 police per lakh population.
• India’s sanctioned strength stood at approximately 197 per lakh on Bureau of Police Research and Development data for 2022.
• Actual strength is materially lower — of the order of 150 to 155 per lakh — because of vacancies.
• For comparison, in 2016 sanctioned strength was about 181 per lakh and actual about 137. The direction of travel is positive; the gap has not closed.

Vacancies

• On BPR&D data for 2022, sanctioned posts stood at about 26.8 lakh against actual strength of about 20.9 lakh — a shortfall of roughly 5.95 lakh, or about 22 per cent.
• More recent reporting for 2025 indicates roughly 5.81 lakh vacancies against about 27.23 lakh sanctioned posts — a very similar proportion.
• Vacancy rates have exceeded 20 per cent for more than a decade.

READ THE TWO SERIES TOGETHER Between 2012 and 2022, sanctioned strength rose from about 21.2 lakh to about 26.8 lakh — a substantial expansion. Over the same period the vacancy rate moved only from about 25 per cent to about 22 per cent. India has been sanctioning posts considerably faster than it has been filling them. The police–population gap is therefore not primarily a budgetary sanction failure — governments have been willing to create the posts. It is a recruitment, selection and retention failure: slow and litigated recruitment cycles, prolonged selection processes, and service conditions that make the constabulary an unattractive career. Why this matters for the answer: the standard recommendation — “increase police strength to meet the UN norm” — misdiagnoses the problem. The posts largely exist. The reform required is in recruitment machinery and service conditions, not in sanction.

The constabulary

The constabulary constitutes roughly 86 per cent of State police forces. It follows that the overwhelming majority of citizen–police interaction in India is with personnel who receive the least training, work the longest hours — commonly reported at eleven to eighteen hours a day — enjoy the poorest service conditions, and have almost no career progression, many retiring in or close to the rank in which they were recruited.

Expenditure on police accounts for roughly three per cent of Union and State budgets combined. The public face of Indian policing is its least‑invested component, and any reform that does not reach the constabulary does not reach the citizen.

Separation of investigation from law and order

This is Directive 4 of Prakash Singh, a standing recommendation of the National Police Commission and of the Second ARC, and it remains substantially unimplemented.

The problem it addresses. The same officer who must control a procession, provide security for a visiting dignitary, manage a bandh and maintain order at a festival is also expected to investigate a murder. The two functions have incompatible requirements: investigation needs continuity, specialisation and uninterrupted time; law and order needs immediate and total availability.

THE SENTENCE TO REMEMBER When the two functions compete for the same officer, law and order always wins — because a law‑and‑order failure is visible today, on the street and in the news, while an investigative failure only becomes visible at trial, years later, when the officer concerned has long since been transferred. This is a direct and badly under‑used explanation for low conviction rates across the Indian criminal justice system, including under the special statutes. Poor investigation is not primarily a matter of officers lacking skill or integrity. It is a matter of an institutional design in which nobody is ever accountable for an investigation, and everybody is accountable for the procession.

Custodial violence and accountability remain the other side of this. The judicial safeguards — D. K. Basu on arrest and detention procedure and PUCL v. State of Maharashtra on encounter investigations — exist and are binding, but enforcement depends on complaints machinery that the Prakash Singh directives were meant to supply and which, as the compliance record shows, has largely not been constituted in working form.

SMART Policing, Community Policing and the Trust Deficit

SMART policing

The SMART formulation, given to the police leadership in 2014, is a statement of aspiration rather than a programme — but it is quotable, and its structure carries a real idea, because each hard attribute is deliberately paired with a soft one.

	Attribute	Paired with
S	Strict	Sensitive
M	Modern	Mobile
A	Alert	Accountable
R	Reliable	Responsive
T	Techno‑savvy	Trained

Strictness with sensitivity; alertness with accountability. That pairing is the substance of the formulation and the reason it is worth citing — it rejects the proposition that effectiveness and public trust are in tension, which is precisely the proposition that the 1861 design assumed.

Community policing models

• Janamaithri Suraksha Project (Kerala) — beat officers assigned to defined localities with a mandate to build sustained relationships, supported by community liaison groups. The most institutionalised of the Indian models.
• Mohalla Committees (Maharashtra) — neighbourhood peace committees bringing together residents across communities with local police, with a well‑documented record in preventing and containing communal violence.
• Friends of Police (Tamil Nadu) — enrolled civilian volunteers assisting the police in non‑coercive functions and acting as a two‑way channel with the community.
• Joint Patrolling Committees (Rajasthan) — structured joint patrolling by police and community representatives.

These programmes are genuinely useful, but their weakness is instructive: they are overwhelmingly dependent on the individual officer who initiates them, and tend to lapse on his transfer. Community policing in India has produced excellent projects and very few institutions, which is itself a consequence of the tenure problem in Directive 3.

The trust deficit

The sources are cumulative and reinforcing:

• The colonial inheritance — a statute and a design built to control a population rather than serve it.
• Custodial violence and encounter deaths, and the perception that accountability for them is rare.
• Perceived political capture — the belief that policing decisions follow political rather than legal considerations, which the failure of the Prakash Singh directives directly sustains.
• Corruption at the point of contact, where the citizen meets the least‑paid and least‑supervised part of the force.
• Bias in policing along lines of caste, class, religion and gender.
• Refusal to register FIRs — the practice of “burking” to suppress recorded crime figures, which teaches citizens that approaching the police is futile.
• Sheer inaccessibility — an overworked, understaffed constabulary with no time for the patient work that trust requires.

WHY THE TRUST DEFICIT IS AN INTERNAL SECURITY PROBLEM, NOT MERELY A GOVERNANCE ONE In a democracy, ground‑level intelligence comes from the public. A neighbour notices an unfamiliar tenant; a shopkeeper notices an unusual purchase; a village notices strangers in the forest. None of that reaches the state unless somebody is willing to walk into a police station and say so. The Multi Agency Centre can distribute intelligence that has been collected. NATGRID can search databases of what has already been recorded. Neither can generate the human input on which both ultimately depend. Therefore: the trust deficit is not a soft concern to be addressed after the security architecture is built. It is a hole in the foundation of that architecture. Every rupee spent on central intelligence infrastructure is leveraged on the willingness of a citizen to talk to a constable — and that willingness is exactly what two centuries of regime policing, and two decades of unimplemented directives, have eroded. This is the strongest closing argument available for police reform in an internal security answer. Use it.

Critical Assessment

What has worked. The technological agenda has delivered. CCTNS has connected every police station in the country and created a genuine national crime database — a completed national programme, which is rare. ICJS is extending that integration across the five pillars of criminal justice, which is precisely the systemic approach the Second ARC recommended. Forensic institution‑building has begun. Several States have enacted new Police Acts and run serious community policing programmes.

What has not. Four failures, and they share a single cause:

• The Prakash Singh directives remain substantially unimplemented twenty years after they were issued, and no Union territory complies, so the Centre is in default on its own directives.
• Separation of investigation from law and order — recommended since 1979, directed in 2006 — has not happened, and the conviction rate reflects it.
• The constabulary, which is 86 per cent of the force and the whole of the citizen’s experience of policing, remains the least trained, worst served and least invested part of the system.
• Recruitment has not kept pace with sanction for over a decade, so the strength gap persists even as posts are created.

The single cause is worth naming plainly. Every one of these failures is politically explicable rather than technically difficult. Connecting seventeen thousand police stations to a national network was a hard engineering problem and India solved it. Giving a Superintendent of Police a guaranteed two‑year tenure requires no technology, no money and no expertise — and has not been done, because it would remove a lever of political control. Where reform has been technical, India has delivered; where reform requires the political executive to give up discretion over the police, it has not.

CURRENT STATUS (AS OF JULY 2026) Strength and vacancies: on BPR&D data for 2022, sanctioned strength stood at about 26.8 lakh against actual strength of about 20.9 lakh — roughly 5.95 lakh vacancies, or about 22 per cent. More recent reporting indicates approximately 5.81 lakh vacancies against about 27.23 lakh sanctioned posts. Vacancy rates have exceeded 20 per cent for more than a decade. Police–population ratio: sanctioned strength of approximately 197 per lakh (2022), with actual strength of the order of 150–155 per lakh, against a commonly cited benchmark of about 222 per lakh. Prakash Singh compliance: no State fully compliant and no Union territory compliant; only around six States provide security of tenure to the police chief and around thirteen have a functioning internal mechanism for transfers and postings. CCTNS: complete — all police stations in the country, over 17,000, are connected. ICJS: Phase II running from 2022–23 to 2025–26, integrating police, courts, prisons, forensics and prosecution, with analytics and AI adoption as stated objectives. Forensics: the BNSS mandatory forensic requirement for offences carrying seven years or more is in force since 1 July 2024; laboratory and personnel capacity has not yet caught up with the obligation.

SECTION TAKEAWAY India polices a constitutional democracy with a force whose design was settled in 1861 for the opposite purpose, and the reforms that would change that design have been recommended since 1979 and judicially directed since 2006 without being implemented by a single State. The technological agenda has succeeded — every police station in the country is now networked — because it was politically costless. The institutional agenda has failed because it is not: fixed tenure and an insulated establishment board would cost the political executive its control over transfers and postings, and that has proved non‑negotiable across every party and every State. The consequence reaches the whole chapter. A weak, distrusted, overstretched local police is why central forces are permanently deployed, why exceptional statutes become semi‑permanent, why the armed forces remain in internal security roles, and why the intelligence architecture is starved at the point where it depends on a citizen’s willingness to speak. Police reform is not one item in the internal security agenda. It is the item on which the cost of every other item depends.