Vacant police posts affecting security: PM

New Delhi: Taking a wide-angle view of the security scenario in the wake of last week’s terror attacks in Jaipur as well as the Naxalite menace, the Prime Minister has said that inadequate police strength in states impedes the detection and prevention mechanism. After talking about India’s intelligence network facing new challenges from tech-savvy terror merchants, Manmohan Singh expressed concern that several states had failed to maintain the sanctioned strength of police force. This was among the concerns highlighted by TOI in a series of reports in August-September last year following the Hyderabad blasts. Singh expressed dissatisfaction over posts lying vacant. "Many states do not have in place the sanctioned strength of police. This is affecting the security scenario," he told reporters at Bagdogra airport after a visit to Bhutan on Saturday. As on January 1, 2007, the existing police strength in India stood at 14.1 lakh, although the sanctioned strength is 15.7 lakh, which works out to 143 cops per one lakh population. New Delhi: Taking a wide-angle view of the security scenario in the wake of last week’s terror attacks in Jaipur as well as the Naxal menace, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said inadequate police strength in the states was impeding the detection and prevention mechanism. India’s police-population ratio is very poor when compared with that in advanced countries and even lower than the UN norm of 222 policemen per lakh population. Most of the advanced countries have between 250-500 policemen per lakh population. The figure in Italy is as high as 559. Even a developing country like Thailand has nearly 400 policemen per lakh population. It is also common knowledge that in India, the number of policemen for law and order and security-related duties gets reduced substantially as a sizeable chunk gets assigned to protect VVIPs. According to figures available with the Bureau of Police Research and Development, the percentage of vacant posts in case of armed police was more (13.8%) compared to that of civil police (9.8%). The actual strength of civil police at the end of 2006 stood at 10,91,899 against a sanctioned strength of 12,09,904. Maharashtra had the highest number of civil police with 140,089 personnel, followed by UP, which had 119,893 policemen. As against the nearly 11 lakh civil police, strength of armed police stood at 314,122. UP has the highest contingent of armed police (33,400), followed by Assam (23,708) and Madhya Pradesh (21,607). Only in four northeastern states — Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura — was the strength of armed cops more than that of civil police.