While horrific crimes like murders and rapes are reported with regularity in Bengaluru and elsewhere in the state, the police in Karnataka are badly short-staffed to deal with them. With their numbers nowhere matching the requirement, the police are often known to suffer from exhaustion and stress.
Going by official data, the state had only 64,909 police personnel as against the sanctioned strength of 94,478 last year and the situation has hardly changed since then. What this means is that there is only one policeman for every 830 people in the state when in countries like the USA, Spain and South Africa, the police to people ratio is one police for every 436 people, one for 198 and one for 347 respectively. In fact, going by the United Nations, there must be one police for every 454 people.
The poor police strength of the state has not gone unnoticed as only last month the Supreme Court pulled up six states with the highest vacancies in the police departments, including Karnataka which has a staggering shortage of around 30,000 police personnel. A bench headed by Chief Justice J S Khehar summoned the home secretaries or officers not below the rank of the joint secretary in April to speak of the vacancies. But this is not the first time that the court has pulled up the state for shortage of police in its villages towns and cities. It had issued a notice to it in 2013 as well, but nothing was done to make up for the shortfall even then. While admitting that the department is short of staff, a police officer says it can do nothing unless the government takes the issue seriously.
That the shortage is impeding investigation is clear with the High Court making a mention of it in a recent judgment. “About two lakh cases/FIRs, final reports have not been submitted by the police, which means the cases must be still under investigation. It was found that main reason for the delay in the investigation of criminal cases is the large number of vacancies in the police. With such few police personnel it is impossible for the department to conduct investigations expeditiously and submit the final reports to the courts,” it said. But its observations too don’t seem to have woken up the government to the need to fill up vacancies in the department, which remains as ill equipped as ever to deal with the increasing crime on the streets in terms of staff.
Home Minister, G. Parameshwar recently promised to fill up 90 percent of the vacancies in the posts of police sub-inspectors (PSIs) and constables (PCs) over the next few years. Speaking to the Deccan Chronicle a few months ago he admitted there was an urgent need to minimize the work pressure on the constables, who were overworked on account of the vacancies that arose annually because of retirement and other reasons.
According to the Ministry of Home Affairs, there should be one police for every 547 Indians. However, official data for 2016 says there is only one policeman for every 720 people in the country.
Understaffed and drowning in paperwork!
The overworked police in Karnataka have more work awaiting them. While they are already dealing with a huge number of road accidents with the state ranking second in the country and Bengaluru listed at number four among cities in this category, they now have the onerous task of filling up a massive report on each of them, even if they are minor.
In addition to rushing the injured to hospitals, taking bodies for postmortems and handing them over to their families, filing challans, FIRs and other mandatory requirements to pursue cases against the guilty, the traffic police have now been presented with a 17-page format to detail every accident, that has been sent to all the director generals of police by the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) with instructions for immediate compliance.
Five of the pages will have to be filled by the overworked local traffic police and the rest will have to be dealt with at the state level.
The 17-page format is the handiwork of a committee constituted by the ministry to review the existing 17 items format for reporting of road accidents. The committee, which included experts from IIT-Delhi, IIT-Kharagpur, World Health Organisation, senior officers of the police and transport departments of the states, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and officers of the Road Transport and Highways Ministry, recommended a uniform accident recording format to be adopted by the police in all the states and Union Territories Based on its recommendations, the ministry requested the state governments in January this year to immediately adopt the new road accident recording format to help it compile the annual road accident data for 2017.
All states, Union Territories and cities are now required to furnish the annual road accident data to the Transport Research Wing (TRW) of MoRTH within a month of the completion of a calendar year going by the ministry's website.
Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic), R. Hithendra, when contacted, said the instructions had been received and conveyed to the policemen in the field in the state. "We have received the instructions and forwarded them to our lower rank officers," he added.
