Law and Order, Anti-Corruption Measures

What Law and Order Means

Law and order is a state of society characterised by the prevention and detection of crime and the prosecution of criminals, together with the prevalence of peace and tranquillity, such that an average citizen has a sense of security about person and property inside the home and outside it. The World Bank treats it as a primary or core function of the state.

Why It Comes First

• Historically, the state came into being to maintain order. In the social contract account, Hobbes described a stateless condition as anarchy in which everyone stands against all, from which people surrender part of their sovereignty to an authority that uses it to bring about order. The first form of the state in its evolution was the police state, whose responsibility was order alone, and the lawful ability to use force remains a defining characteristic of statehood.
• As a precondition for development. Foreign investment does not flow to states where order is weak. The literature contrasts Bihar and militancy-affected Jammu and Kashmir, where per capita income declined sharply, with Punjab, which emerged as one of India's most prosperous states after terrorism ended.
• As a manifestation of good governance. Order and progress are its two expressions, and there can be no progress without order. The relationship is a vicious circle: the absence of progress fuels further disorder, which is the standard explanation for the spread of Naxalism into the least developed regions.

The Paradox of Empowerment

One observation in the literature deserves to be carried into an answer because it explains something the security framing cannot. As Indian democracy empowers groups that history disempowered, conflict potential increases rather than decreases: Dalits and minorities become assertive of their rights, and the assertion is resisted, so that caste conflict of the kind seen in Bihar becomes a law and order problem.

The implication is uncomfortable and important. Disorder of this kind is not a failure of democracy but a symptom of it working, and an administration that treats such conflict purely as a policing problem will suppress the assertion rather than secure the right. The law and order machinery in a society undergoing social change is therefore doing something more delicate than keeping the peace.

Police Administration

The British Legacy

• Warren Hastings created the office of District Collector in 1772 and placed law and order within its ambit.
• Lord Cornwallis established the daroga system of policing, taking police powers away from the zamindars, and in 1792 separated the police force from the district magistrate's control.
• The British Indian government constituted a Police Commission in 1860, on whose recommendation the Indian Police Act of 1861 was enacted, creating a force modelled on the Irish Constabulary.

The choice of model is the most consequential fact in Indian police history. The Irish constabulary was an armed force designed to control a disaffected population on behalf of a government it did not consent to, not a civil police designed to serve a community. India inherited that design, and the 1861 Act still governs, which is why every reform commission for fifty years has begun by recommending its repeal.

The Structure Today

Police is an umbrella term covering the state police forces and the central police organisations including the armed police forces. The total strength exceeds 18.5 lakh, of which roughly 13 lakh are state police, distributed across more than 12,000 police stations, with about ten lakh civil police supported by three lakh armed police personnel.

At state level the teeth-to-tail ratio is about 1:8: for every eight constables and head constables there is one officer of the rank of assistant sub-inspector and above, though the figure varies between states. The consequence is a promotion system with very little room in it, which is the structural source of the poor morale at the cutting edge. The Padmanabhaiah Committee of 2000 recommended that the ratio be brought to 1:4, and the recommendation has not been implemented.

The Indian Police Service

The IPS is an All India Service, and its all-India character gives its members a particular advantage in handling problems that cross state boundaries. The Ministry of Home Affairs is its cadre-controlling authority, and the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy at Hyderabad, established in 1948, is the national training institution and has established itself as a centre of excellence.

The Central Armed Police Forces

Seven central police forces operate under the Union government and play a key role in managing internal security, a role that cross-border terrorism has made more demanding.

• Assam Rifles, known as the Friends of the Hill People, the oldest police force in the country, headquartered at Shillong, with the dual role of internal security in the north-east and guarding the border with Myanmar.
• Border Security Force, raised in 1965 and headquartered in New Delhi, responsible along the borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh, and deployed on the Line of Control under the operational control of the army.
• Central Reserve Police Force, originally raised in 1939, now handling law and order, counter-insurgency, anti-militancy and anti-terrorism, and assisting states in maintaining public order.
• Rapid Action Force, a specialised unit of the CRPF formed in 1992 by reorganising ten battalions, intended for communal and riot situations.
• Alongside these are the forces for industrial security, border guarding in the Himalayan sector, and the specialised counter-terrorist force.

The steady growth of central forces raises a federal question worth stating: public order is a State List subject, and a Union that maintains large forces deployed within states at their request, and sometimes in the face of their reluctance, exercises a practical authority the constitutional distribution did not contemplate.

What the Police Actually Do

The police are the only agency available twenty-four hours a day throughout the year to respond to a citizen in distress, and it is a mistake to understand their activity in one dimension. Four roles are usually distinguished.

• Law enforcement: control and reduction of crime through preventive action, detection and investigation.
• Maintenance of order, meaning peace and tranquillity, which includes protecting the constitutional and legal rights of citizens, resolving conflict, regulating movement, helping those in distress and generally promoting a sense of security.
• Internal security: dealing with sabotage, espionage, terrorism and political threats, and enforcing the special security laws.
• Social service and social change: enforcing social legislation such as the laws against immoral trafficking, dowry, bonded and child labour and untouchability, and thereby protecting the weaker sections. On this view the Indian police is a public service institution required to perform its role with something like missionary zeal.

The fourth role is now contested. There is a demand that the police confine themselves to law and order and that the enforcement of social legislation pass to other agencies, so that such legislation may be implemented efficiently. The argument has force on both sides: a force trained to suppress disorder is poorly suited to protecting a bride from her in-laws, and no other agency in an Indian district has the reach or the coercive authority to do it either.

A Working Typology

The literature offers a rough classification of those the police deal with that is more useful than it first appears. A small number are law-abiding and require no external control to remain so. A small number are determined offenders, and the police role towards them is protective, keeping them out of circulation. The vast majority lie in between and behave well under some degree of control, for whom the mere visible presence of the police is what secures compliance.

The administrative implication is that the greater part of policing is not detection or coercion but presence, which is precisely what the finding that 82 per cent of people never see a beat constable calls into question.

What the Indian Police Has Achieved

An assessment that lists only failures is not an assessment. The Indian police has controlled and reversed terrorism in Punjab, contained militancy in Jammu and Kashmir, and suppressed the earlier phase of Naxalism in West Bengal. It has conducted general elections of extraordinary scale, maintained order through communal provocations that might have destroyed a less resilient state, and done so under political conditions and with equipment and pay that no comparable force would accept. The failures set out above are real, and they are failures of an institution that has also done these things.

The Problems

The ills of the Indian police are wider than political interference, and an answer that treats interference as the whole problem misses most of it.

• Subordination without accountability. Police is a state subject, each state government controls its force, and no mechanism has been created to make the police accountable to the community. The force is subordinate to the state executive rather than an autonomous institution, so it succumbs to the wishes of political masters, most damagingly in sensitive situations.
• Unchecked power. The police may detain, arrest, lawfully carry arms and curtail liberty, and in the extreme may cause death. That power carries obvious potential for abuse, and there is no structural device to fix responsibility for its exercise.
• Corruption. It is so rampant that it is difficult even to have a first information report recorded without payment, with the consequence that crime goes unreported.
• Custodial violence, including torture, and the infliction on women and girls of custodial rape, molestation and severe harassment.
• Loss of public confidence. A survey cited in the literature found that 71 per cent of people did not report crime because they believed the police could not or would not act, and 82 per cent said no beat constable ever visited their village.
• Personnel failures. Recruitment of constables and, to a degree, sub-inspectors turns largely on physical fitness, while service attitude, the ability to deal with people, problem-solving, quick decision and the writing of a clear report go untested. The Gore Committee of 1974 found professional training neglected, and promotional avenues at the cutting-edge level remain poor.
• Obsolete methods. The state police apparatus is stagnant, its methods of investigation old and crude, and officers know very little of modern methods for handling communal riots, student agitations and violent disorder.
• Role confusion. The police have multiple and at times contradictory roles, as an arm of government, as a social service agency and as an instrument of development, and there is no consensus in a plural society on which should prevail.

The figure of 71 per cent is the one to build an argument around. A police force whose principal failure is that people do not approach it has a legitimacy problem rather than a capacity problem, and equipment, numbers and training will not reach it.

Police Reform

• The National Police Commission (1977 to 1981) produced eight reports and remains the most thorough examination. It recommended a State Security Commission to lay down policy guidelines, evaluate performance and act as a forum of appeal; a statutory tenure of four years for the Director General of Police with a transparent selection process; separation of the investigation wing from the law and order wing; and the replacement of the 1861 Act.
• The Ribeiro Committee and the Padmanabhaiah Committee of 2000 followed, the latter recommending the improved officer ratio noted above.
• The Police Act Drafting Committee under Soli Sorabjee, constituted in September 2005, submitted the Model Police Act, 2006 in October 2006. Its guiding idea was a professional police service in a democratic society: efficient, effective, responsive to people's needs and accountable to the rule of law, governed by principles of impartiality and human rights norms, with particular attention to the protection of weaker sections and minorities. The shift from force to service is the whole argument in a word.
• Prakash Singh (2006). Two retired officers and a non-governmental organisation had petitioned in 1996 for implementation of the National Police Commission's recommendations, and after ten years the Supreme Court issued directions addressing autonomy, accountability and efficiency. The Court observed that whimsical transfer of police personnel both demoralises and politicises the force.
• Non-compliance. Two years after the directions, only the north-eastern states, Uttarakhand and Goa had complied; the larger states refused on one pretext or another. On 16 May 2008 the Supreme Court appointed a committee under retired Justice K.T. Thomas to oversee implementation.

That sequence is the most instructive thing in this topic. A commission reported comprehensively in 1981; a court ordered implementation in 2006; a monitoring committee was needed by 2008; and the 1861 Act still stands. Police reform in India is not blocked by an absence of diagnosis or even of legal compulsion, but by the unwillingness of state governments to surrender an instrument they find useful.

The Seven Directives in Prakash Singh

In Prakash Singh v. Union of India, decided on 22 September 2006, the Supreme Court issued seven directions binding on the Union and the states until they enacted fresh police legislation. The directions drew on the National Police Commission, the Ribeiro and Padmanabhaiah Committees and the Sorabjee draft, and each answers one of three defects: political control without accountability, insecurity of tenure, and the absence of any channel for public complaint.

1. State Security Commission in every state, chaired by the Chief Minister or Home Minister, to ensure that the state government does not exercise unwarranted influence or pressure on the police, to lay down broad policy guidelines and to evaluate the performance of the state police. States could follow the models proposed by the National Human Rights Commission, the Ribeiro Committee or the Sorabjee Committee.
2. Selection and tenure of the DGP. The Director General of Police to be chosen by the state from among the three senior-most officers empanelled by the UPSC on the basis of length of service, record and range of experience, and to serve a minimum tenure of two years irrespective of the date of superannuation.
3. Tenure of field officers. Officers on operational duty, the Inspector General of a zone, the Deputy Inspector General of a range, the Superintendent of Police of a district and the officer in charge of a police station, to have a minimum tenure of two years.
4. Separation of investigation from law and order, beginning with towns and urban areas with a population of ten lakh or more, so that investigation becomes speedier and more expert.
5. Police Establishment Board in each state, composed of the DGP and four other senior officers, to decide transfers, postings and promotions of officers of the rank of Deputy Superintendent and below, and to make recommendations for those above.
6. Police Complaints Authorities at the state level, for serious misconduct by officers of the rank of Superintendent and above, and at the district level, for officers of the rank of Deputy Superintendent and below, covering allegations such as death, grievous hurt or rape in custody.
7. National Security Commission at the Union level, to prepare a panel for the selection and placement of the chiefs of the central police organisations, who were also to have a minimum tenure of two years.

Why the Opportunity Was Lost

Compliance has been formal rather than substantive. Many states enacted new police Acts after 2006, but these generally gave statutory form to diluted versions of the directions: security commissions dominated by government nominees and without binding force, establishment boards that left the final word on transfers with the government, and complaints authorities staffed by serving officials. The K.T. Thomas monitoring committee reported in 2010 that the states had shown indifference to the directions. In July 2018 the Court had to issue further orders on the selection of the DGP, requiring states to send proposals to the UPSC at least three months before a vacancy and barring the appointment of an acting DGP, because acting appointments were being used to bypass the panel.

The reasons for the lackadaisical response are several. Police is a State List subject and a political instrument that ruling parties of every colour find useful. States presented the directions as judicial intrusion into a legislative and executive domain. Civil servants and police officers disagreed over control of postings, and the directions carried no sanction for non-compliance beyond contempt, which the Court was reluctant to use against elected governments. Prakash Singh therefore shows the limit of judicial direction as an instrument of administrative reform: a court can prescribe structures but cannot supply the will to make them work, and a state government that chairs the body meant to insulate the police from itself can comply in form and defeat the purpose.

Internal Security and the Federal Problem

Law and order is a State List subject under the Seventh Schedule, and the central government plays a supplementary role whenever the need arises. Within a state the Home Minister is the final authority on law and order policy, subject to cabinet approval, and the machinery implements what he lays down.

This creates the central difficulty of Indian internal security. The threats that now dominate, terrorism, insurgency, organised crime and left-wing extremism, cross state boundaries and are beyond the capacity of a single state's police, while the constitutional responsibility for meeting them lies with the states. The Union's response has been to build capacity it can deploy on request, the central armed police forces and central investigative and intelligence agencies, so that the practical balance has shifted towards the Centre without any change in the constitutional distribution.

Intelligence

Intelligence is the bedrock of police effectiveness, in crime control and in order maintenance alike, and it is at present a weak link. The Vohra Committee called for a nodal agency at the national level to integrate all intelligence, and it has been suggested that each state create a separate intelligence department distinct from the police department.

The Vohra Committee's wider finding is the one that belongs in an answer on this topic: it examined the nexus between criminals, politicians and bureaucrats and concluded that such networks had developed considerable power, which is the systemic condition behind both the law and order failures and the corruption discussed below.

Community Policing

Security cannot be supplied to a community that will not assist in it, and community policing arrangements are the attempt to formalise that assistance in crime prevention and investigation. The importance of the approach follows directly from the finding that most people do not report crime: a force that cannot obtain information cannot detect, and information comes from a public that trusts the institution asking for it.

Autonomy and Accountability Together

The National Police Commission observed that the police lack both autonomy and accountability, and the pairing is the important part. The police must have autonomy in the investigation of crime, so that an investigation cannot be directed or suppressed from outside; and accountability must be ensured at the same time, so that autonomy does not become impunity.

Most Indian debate treats these as alternatives, demanding either insulation from politicians or control over an abusive force. They are in fact complements, and a reform that delivers one without the other produces either a politicised police or an unaccountable one. This is the single most useful proposition to organise an answer on police reform around.

SMART Policing and Technology

The Prime Minister set out the idea of SMART policing at the conference of Directors General of Police at Guwahati in 2014: a police that is Strict and Sensitive, Modern and Mobile, Alert and Accountable, Reliable and Responsive, and Techno-savvy and Trained. The formula joins attitude to equipment, and its point is that technology without a change in behaviour only reproduces the old police more efficiently.

• CCTNS. The Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems, approved in 2009 as a mission mode project and run by the National Crime Records Bureau, links police stations across the country on a common platform for FIRs, investigation records and criminal databases. The Interoperable Criminal Justice System builds on it to connect police, forensic laboratories, prosecution, courts and prisons.
• Cyber crime. The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, set up under the Ministry of Home Affairs in 2020, the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal and the 1930 helpline address offences that cross state and national borders.
• Citizen services, including electronic registration of information and the zero FIR, which the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 now provides for, allowing an FIR at any police station whatever its jurisdiction.
• Analytics and surveillance: facial recognition, city CCTV networks, mapping of crime hot spots, and the records created under the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022, which allows the police to collect measurements including finger impressions, iris and retina scans and biological samples and to retain them for seventy-five years.

Technology and community policing address the same deficit from opposite ends: one improves what the police can know without the public, the other what the public will tell them. Kerala's Janamaithri Suraksha project of 2008, Tamil Nadu's Friends of Police and the mohalla committees of Maharashtra's riot-prone towns built standing contact between police and residents through beat officers, local committees and joint patrolling. Their record shows that community policing lasts where it is part of the station's routine and lapses where it depends on one officer's enthusiasm and ends with his transfer.

Ethical and Privacy Limits of AI in Policing

• Legality. In K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) the Supreme Court held privacy to be a fundamental right, so any intrusion must satisfy the tests of legality, legitimate aim and proportionality. Much police use of facial recognition and analytics rests on executive orders rather than on a law that defines its purpose, limits and safeguards.
• Data protection. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 permits the Union to exempt state agencies in the interest of security and public order, so the main statutory safeguard may not reach police processing.
• Bias. Systems trained on past arrest data reproduce past patterns of policing, so communities already over-policed are flagged more often, and facial recognition produces false matches more often for some groups.
• Opacity. A suspect cannot contest a decision whose reasoning even the officer cannot explain, which sits badly with the requirement that coercive state action be reasoned.
• Function creep, where data gathered to investigate cyber crime or trace missing children is used to watch protest and dissent.

These are reasons to regulate rather than to abandon the technology, since cyber crime cannot be policed without automated tools. The answer lies in a statutory framework for police use of AI, independent audit of algorithms, a human decision at every coercive step, and oversight by a body outside the police.

The National Investigation Agency

The National Investigation Agency Act, 2008 was passed within weeks of the Mumbai attacks of November 2008 and received assent on 31 December 2008, creating India's first federal agency for terrorism and related offences. Its premise is that terror networks cross state boundaries while police remains a State List subject.

• Purpose. To investigate and prosecute the Scheduled Offences listed in the Act, among them offences under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Atomic Energy Act, the anti-hijacking and maritime safety laws and the law on weapons of mass destruction, which affect the sovereignty, security and integrity of India.
• Jurisdiction. A state forwards the report of a scheduled offence to the Union, which decides within fifteen days whether to entrust it to the NIA, and the Union may also direct the NIA to take up a case on its own motion. No consent of the state is required, unlike the CBI, and NIA officers exercise police powers throughout India. The state police may investigate until the NIA takes over.
• Special Courts try NIA cases, with appeals lying to a bench of two judges of the High Court.
• The 2019 amendment extended the Agency's reach to scheduled offences committed outside India against Indian citizens or affecting the interests of India, added human trafficking, counterfeit currency, manufacture and sale of prohibited arms, cyber-terrorism and offences under the Explosive Substances Act, 1908, and allowed the Union to designate Sessions Courts as Special Courts.

The Agency has given counter-terrorism investigation a single national point of command, with specialised staff and courts. The objections are federal and civil-libertarian. States argue that a Union agency able to take over cases without consent erodes their responsibility for police and public order, and Chhattisgarh challenged the Act before the Supreme Court in 2020 under Article 131. The extension to trafficking and counterfeiting carries the intrusion beyond terrorism, and the stringent bail provisions of the UAPA, under which most NIA cases are prosecuted, keep accused persons in custody for years before trial. The Agency's effectiveness still depends on state police, who are the first responders and the main source of local intelligence.

AFSPA and the Withdrawal Debate

The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 gives the armed forces special powers in areas declared disturbed. The declaration under Section 3 may be made by the Governor or by the Union, the Union's power having been added in 1972, and it is the declaration rather than the Act that decides where the powers apply.

• Section 4 allows an officer, after such warning as he considers necessary, to fire upon or otherwise use force, even to the causing of death, against a person acting in contravention of an order prohibiting assemblies of five or more or the carrying of weapons, to destroy arms dumps and fortified positions, to arrest without warrant on reasonable suspicion, and to enter and search premises without warrant.
• Section 6 bars prosecution or suit against any person acting under the Act without the previous sanction of the Union government, which has rarely been given.
• In Naga People's Movement of Human Rights v. Union of India (1997) a Constitution Bench upheld the Act, while requiring periodic review of a declaration, minimum force, and the handing over of arrested persons to the police without delay.
• In Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association v. Union of India (2016) the Court held that excessive or retaliatory force is not protected even in a disturbed area, and ordered investigation of alleged fake encounters in Manipur.

The security case is that soldiers fighting armed insurgents in place of a civil administration need legal protection for decisions taken under fire, and that the Army is deployed only because the state police cannot cope. The rights case is that wide powers combined with immunity breed impunity. The killing of Thangjam Manorama in Assam Rifles custody in Manipur in 2004, Irom Sharmila's sixteen-year fast for repeal, and the killing of civilians at Oting in Nagaland's Mon district in December 2021 made the Act the symbol of alienation in the north-east.

The Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy Committee, set up in November 2004 after the Manorama case, recommended in June 2005 that the Act be repealed and the necessary powers placed in the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act with safeguards. The second ARC, in its report on public order, endorsed repeal on the same lines, and neither recommendation was accepted. The Santosh Hegde Commission, appointed by the Supreme Court in 2013, found the Manipur encounters it examined to be fake.

Tripura withdrew the Act in May 2015, after its government judged that the state police had contained the insurgency, and Meghalaya was freed of it in 2018. From April 2022 the Union substantially reduced the disturbed areas in Assam, Nagaland and Manipur, citing improved security. Tripura is the strongest argument for a rational policy, because withdrawal followed a demonstrated capacity of the state police to hold the ground and was not followed by a return of insurgency. It suggests a rule in place of case-by-case sentiment: the Act should be area-specific and time-bound, its continuation should rest on a published review of the security situation, withdrawal should follow the building of police capacity, and sanction for prosecution should be decided within a fixed period. The ethnic violence in Manipur from May 2023 shows that the reverse movement remains possible, so the argument is for disciplined use rather than for assuming that the conditions requiring the Act have passed.

Criminalisation of Politics

The Vohra Committee, constituted in July 1993 after the Bombay serial blasts under Union Home Secretary N.N. Vohra, reported in October 1993 that crime syndicates were in places virtually running a parallel government and that the nexus of criminal gangs, police, bureaucrats and politicians had developed considerable power. The report was placed before Parliament only in 1995. The distinction drawn in the questions is real. Criminalisation of politics is the use of criminals by politicians for money, muscle and votes. Politicisation of criminals is the entry of criminals into politics in their own right, seeking office for protection and patronage, and it grew as the first taught criminals their electoral value.

• Union of India v. Association for Democratic Reforms (2002) held that voters have a right to know a candidate's criminal antecedents, assets and educational qualifications, and candidates now file affidavits disclosing them.
• Lily Thomas v. Union of India (2013) struck down Section 8(4) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, which had let a sitting legislator keep his seat while an appeal was pending, so that a member convicted of a disqualifying offence, including any offence with a sentence of two years or more, is disqualified at once.
• Public Interest Foundation v. Union of India (2018), a Constitution Bench, declined to add disqualification on the framing of charges, leaving that to Parliament, but directed candidates to declare pending cases prominently and candidates and parties to publicise them widely in print and electronic media, and urged Parliament to legislate.
• Rambabu Singh Thakur v. Sunil Arora (2020) required parties to publish on their websites and in newspapers the criminal record of each candidate they field and the reasons for selecting that person, with winnability alone not an acceptable reason, and to report compliance to the Election Commission.

The data show the limits of disclosure. The share of elected Lok Sabha members declaring criminal cases, as analysed by the Association for Democratic Reforms, rose from 30 per cent in 2009 to 43 per cent in 2019 and 46 per cent in 2024. The Law Commission's 244th Report (2014) proposed disqualification on the framing of charges for offences punishable with five years or more, with safeguards against motivated cases, and Parliament has not acted on it.

Why Institutional Change Is Not Enough

Each measure has improved the supply of information and left the demand for such candidates untouched. Parties field them because they win. They win because they can finance campaigns and deliver protection, services and quick settlement of disputes where the state cannot, and voters who distrust a slow police and judiciary rationally prefer a strongman who gets things done. The consequences for law and order administration are direct: pressure on postings and investigations, withdrawal of cases against the politically connected, intimidation of witnesses, and a police force that learns whose writ runs. Disclosure, special courts for legislators and disqualification on conviction address symptoms. The causes lie in election finance, in trials so slow that an accused can contest for decades while presumed innocent, and in the weakness of the state's own delivery, and reform that does not reach them will be outrun.

The Criminal Justice System

Policing is one part of a chain that runs from investigation through prosecution and trial to punishment and correction, and the chain fails at every link.

The Committee on Reforms of the Criminal Justice System under Justice V.S. Malimath reported to the Ministry of Home Affairs in April 2003 with 158 recommendations, focusing on the pendency of criminal cases and the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the system. Its proposals included separating the investigation wing from law and order duties, strengthening the prosecution, giving courts a more inquisitorial role in the search for truth, and measures on victim rights and compensation. Several recommendations, particularly those touching the right to silence and the standard of proof, attracted serious criticism from human rights organisations, and the Committee's report remains contested rather than implemented.

• Pendency and delay, which is the system's defining failure and the direct cause of the undertrial problem below.
• Investigation tied to law and order duties, so that the officer investigating a case is also managing a procession, which is why separation of the two wings appears in every report from the National Police Commission onwards.
• Weak prosecution, with prosecutors appointed on political considerations and poorly coordinated with investigators.
• Low conviction rates, which destroy deterrence and encourage the extra-legal shortcuts the police then take.
• The second ARC recommended creating local courts in rural areas with populations of twenty-five thousand and above, to bring adjudication within reach.

Separating Investigation from Prosecution

Two separations are often confused. The first is the separation of the investigation wing of the police from its law and order wing, which the National Police Commission recommended and Prakash Singh ordered. The second is the separation of investigation from prosecution: the officer who collects the evidence should not control the lawyer who decides whether it is fit to place before a court. The public prosecutor is an officer of the court, whose duty is to help the court reach the truth rather than to secure a conviction at any cost.

• Judicial basis. In S.B. Shahane v. State of Maharashtra (1995) the Supreme Court directed that assistant public prosecutors be organised in a cadre independent of the police department.
• The Code of Criminal Procedure. Section 25A, inserted by the amendment of 2005, enabled a state to establish a Directorate of Prosecution headed by a Director drawn from advocates of at least ten years' practice and appointed with the concurrence of the Chief Justice of the High Court, with public prosecutors subordinate to him.
• The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, in force from 1 July 2024, carries the provision into Section 20 and adds a District Directorate of Prosecution in every district. A Director or Deputy Director must have practised for at least fifteen years or be or have been a Sessions Judge. Supervision is graded by the gravity of the offence: the Director monitors cases punishable with ten years or more, life imprisonment or death and advises on appeals, Deputy Directors scrutinise police reports and monitor cases punishable with seven to ten years, and Assistant Directors monitor the rest. The provision remains enabling, since the state may establish the Directorates, the Director works under the administrative control of the state Home Department, and the Chief Justice's concurrence in the appointment, required by Section 25A, is no longer prescribed.
• Related changes in the Sanhita improve the evidence the prosecutor receives: forensic examination of the crime scene is mandatory for offences punishable with seven years or more, searches and seizures are to be recorded by audio-video means, and time limits are set for framing charges and pronouncing judgment.

Merits and Difficulties

• Independent scrutiny. A prosecutor outside police control can refuse a weak or motivated charge-sheet, which protects the accused from harassment and the court from cases that should never have been filed.
• Professionalism. A separate cadre with its own recruitment, training and career builds expertise that a prosecutor dependent on police goodwill, or appointed on political considerations, does not acquire.
• Rights of the accused. Distance between investigator and prosecutor reduces the incentive to extract confessions or manufacture evidence to secure a conviction.
• The coordination cost. Investigators and prosecutors answering to different hierarchies communicate poorly, so gaps in evidence surface only at trial, which is one explanation offered for low conviction rates.
• Control moved rather than removed. Where the Directorate sits under the Home Department and the government makes the appointments, independence from the police can coexist with dependence on the executive.

The balance now generally favoured is separation of control with integration of work: an independent prosecution service that advises investigators from the early stages of serious cases, without either side directing the other.

Judicial Delay and Pendency

Delay is the point at which the justice system fails most visibly, in civil as in criminal cases. More than five crore cases are pending across Indian courts, the great majority in the district and subordinate courts, and the National Judicial Data Grid now publishes pendency court by court.

Causes

• Too few judges. The Law Commission's 120th Report (1987) recommended fifty judges per million population, and the ratio remains around twenty-one. Sanctioned posts are themselves left vacant for long periods, in the High Courts through delays in the collegium and government process, and in the district judiciary through slow recruitment.
• Procedure. Liberal adjournments, unenforced time limits, many layers of appeal and interlocutory challenges let a determined litigant prolong a case almost indefinitely.
• The state as litigant. Government is the largest single litigant, and departments appeal adverse orders as routine, because no officer is blamed for appealing and any officer may be blamed for not doing so.
• Weak investigation and prosecution, which send poorly prepared criminal cases to trial and keep undertrials in prison.
• Infrastructure and staff, from courtrooms to support staff and digital capacity, which for the subordinate courts depend on state budgets.

The Colonial Ethos

The charge that the system remains colonial refers to more than its age. Its procedural codes, adversarial style, the language of the higher courts, long vacations and forms of address were designed for a system that dispensed justice to subjects rather than delivered it to citizens. The replacement of the Indian Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Indian Evidence Act by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam from 1 July 2024 was presented as decolonisation, and their procedural content, electronic summons, trial by video conference, recognition of electronic records as evidence and time limits for charges and judgments, addresses delay directly. Critics reply that most of the substantive law was carried over, and that the ethos lies in how courts are run rather than in the names of the codes.

Reforms

• e-Courts. The e-Courts Mission Mode Project computerised the district courts and created the National Judicial Data Grid. Its third phase, approved in September 2023 with an outlay of Rs 7,210 crore, aims at digital and paperless courts with e-filing and virtual hearings.
• Gram Nyayalayas. The Gram Nyayalayas Act, 2008, in force from October 2009, provides for mobile courts at the intermediate panchayat level, presided over by a Nyayadhikari with the powers of a first class magistrate and following simplified procedure. States have notified far fewer than the Act envisaged, and many of those notified do not function.
• Fast-track and special courts, including those for sexual offences against women and children and for cases against legislators.
• Alternative dispute resolution through Lok Adalats under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987, commercial courts and the Mediation Act, 2023.
• An All India Judicial Service, enabled by Article 312 since the 42nd Amendment, which would recruit district judges nationally and has been resisted by several states and High Courts.
• Reducing government litigation by screening appeals and settling disputes between government bodies outside court.

The Law Commission's 245th Report (2014) argued that the judge-population ratio is a poor guide and that judicial strength should be calculated from the rates at which cases are filed and disposed of. The point generalises: more judges will help only if procedure, the state's own litigation and the quality of investigation change with them, since an efficient judiciary depends as much on what reaches it as on how many sit.

Prisons

Prisons are a State List subject administered under legislation inherited from the colonial period, principally the Prisons Act of 1894, whose object was custody and discipline rather than correction.

The Mulla Committee

The All India Committee on Jail Reforms, chaired by Justice A.N. Mulla and working from 1980 to 1983, was asked to review the laws, rules and regulations with the overall objective of protecting society and rehabilitating offenders. Its recommendations included improving prison conditions throughout the country through adequate provision of clothing, sanitation, food and ventilation; training prison staff properly and organising them into distinct cadres; and establishing an All India Service to be called the Indian Prisons and Correctional Service so that prison officials could be recruited nationally.

The proposal for a national service is the most telling of these. Prison administration is the lowest-status branch of Indian public administration, staffed by officers few of whom chose it, and the Committee identified that as a cause rather than a consequence of the system's condition.

Overcrowding and Undertrials

The defining fact of Indian prisons is that most of the people in them have not been convicted of anything. The National Crime Records Bureau's prison statistics report an undertrial share of roughly 73 per cent of the prison population, with national occupancy above capacity. While the great majority of undertrials are confined for under a year, a significant number have been held for more than five years without conviction.

The administrative significance is that this is not primarily a prison problem. It is the criminal justice system's delay and the operation of bail, which turns on the ability to furnish surety, arriving in the prison as overcrowding. A poor accused who cannot furnish bail serves a sentence before trial, and a prison administration can do nothing about it. Any answer that treats overcrowding as a question of building more prisons has misidentified the cause.

The Model Prisons Act, 2023

The Ministry of Home Affairs prepared the Model Prisons Act, 2023 to replace the Act of 1894 and to reorient prison administration towards the reformation and rehabilitation of inmates. Its salient features include provision for security assessment and segregation of prisoners; individual sentence planning; a grievance redressal mechanism; a prison development board; legal aid and support for parole and premature release; encouragement of open prisons as a means of addressing overcrowding; and an intended change of attitude towards prisoners.

Because prisons are a State List subject the Act is a model for states to adopt, which is the same limitation that attends the Model Police Act, and its effect will depend entirely on how many states enact it and in what form.

Corruption

Corruption is the use of public office for private gain, and its administrative significance is that it converts a public entitlement into a purchasable favour, which destroys equality before the administration more completely than any formal discrimination.

Why It Occurs

• Discretion. The Santhanam Committee concluded that the discretionary powers enjoyed by civil servants led to harassment, malpractice and corruption. Wherever an official may decide either way without having to justify the choice, the decision acquires a price.
• Scarcity and control. A licensing system that rations a valuable permission creates rent by design, which is why liberalisation reduced some forms of corruption while creating others in regulation and procurement.
• Low probability of detection, arising from weak investigation, slow prosecution and a low conviction rate.
• Procedural complexity, which creates the intermediary who navigates it and is paid for doing so.
• Political finance, which generates a demand for funds that administrative discretion can supply.
• Societal tolerance. As the note on personnel administration observes, where favouritism and bribery are ordinary in the wider society, the official is asked to observe a standard that nothing around him observes.

The Santhanam Committee

Appointed in 1962 under K. Santhanam with four other members of Parliament and two senior officers, the Committee examined corruption in government departments and recommended measures to check it, expressly excluding political and ministerial corruption from its terms of reference. It reported in 1964, and the government accepted 106 of its 137 recommendations.

Among its proposals were the amendment of Article 311 so that the judicial process in corruption cases could be simplified and expedited; the strengthening of vigilance organisations in ministries and departments; and, on disciplinary rules, the withdrawal of pension in whole or part and compulsory retirement on completion of twenty-five years of service or on attaining fifty years of age, whichever is earlier, where an officer's integrity is suspect. Its principal institutional legacy is the Central Vigilance Commission.

The exclusion of ministerial corruption from its terms of reference is worth noting rather than passing over. A committee constituted to examine corruption in government, forbidden to examine corruption by ministers, illustrates the boundary that Indian anti-corruption machinery has repeatedly been designed to respect, and which the Lokpal was created to cross.

The Anti-Corruption Machinery

The framework is a layered one, and the standard enumeration is worth having in full because questions frequently ask for the machinery rather than for an argument.

• The Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, as amended in 2018, which is the substantive criminal law.
• The Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952, used against political leaders and eminent public men.
• The conduct rules: the All India Services (Conduct) Rules, 1968, the Central Civil Services (Conduct) Rules, 1964 and the Railway Services (Conduct) Rules, 1966.
• Vigilance organisations in ministries, departments, attached and subordinate offices and public undertakings.
• The Central Bureau of Investigation, 1963.
• The Central Vigilance Commission, 1964, and the State Vigilance Commissions of the same year.
• Anti-corruption bureaus in the states.
• Lokayuktas in the states and the Lokpal at the Centre.
• Divisional vigilance boards and district vigilance officers.

The Central Vigilance Commission

The CVC is the principal agency for preventing corruption in the central government. It was established in 1964 by an executive resolution on the Santhanam Committee's recommendation, and was given statutory status by the Central Vigilance Commission Act, 2003 following the Supreme Court's direction in the Vineet Narain case. It is a multi-member body of a Central Vigilance Commissioner and two Vigilance Commissioners, appointed by the President on the recommendation of a committee of the Prime Minister, the Home Minister and the Leader of the Opposition.

Its independence is protected on the constitutional pattern: a Commissioner may be removed by the President on the ground of proved misbehaviour or incapacity only after the matter has been referred to the Supreme Court and the Court, on inquiry, has advised removal. He is deemed guilty of misbehaviour if he is concerned or interested in any contract or agreement made by the central government, or participates in its profit or in any benefit arising from it otherwise than as a member of an incorporated company in common with other members.

Functions

• To exercise superintendence over the vigilance administration of the ministries of the central government and its authorities.
• To exercise superintendence over the functioning of the Delhi Special Police Establishment in so far as it relates to the investigation of offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act.
• To review the progress of investigations conducted by the Delhi Special Police Establishment into alleged offences under that Act.
• To review the progress of applications pending with competent authorities for sanction of prosecution under that Act, which addresses the point at which corruption cases most often stall.
• To tender advice to the central government and its authorities on matters referred to it.
• To inquire or cause inquiries into complaints against specified categories of public servants.

The Commission's central weakness is that its role is advisory. It recommends, and the department that receives the recommendation decides whether to act. An institution designed to supervise vigilance without the power to compel a disciplinary authority is dependent on the good faith of the body it supervises.

The Central Bureau of Investigation

The CBI's investigative arm derives its powers from the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946, under which it enjoys powers of investigation and prosecution; its role is supplementary to the state police forces. To avoid duplication and overlap, administrative arrangements provide that the Special Police Establishment takes up cases essentially and substantially concerned with the affairs or employees of the central government, even where state government employees are also involved, while other cases remain with the state police.

Its structural weaknesses are well known and follow from that legal basis. It functions under an Act that does not name it; it requires the consent of a state government to operate within that state, and general consent has been withdrawn by several states; its officers' careers rest with their parent cadres; and its administrative control lies with the central government whose affairs it frequently investigates. The Supreme Court's description of it in one case as a caged parrot captured the dependence, and the remedy repeatedly proposed, a separate statute, a fixed tenure for the Director and selection by a broad-based committee, addresses exactly that.

Lokpal and Lokayukta

The ombudsman institution addresses what the CVC and CBI do not: corruption at the political level and maladministration that is legal but unjust. The Indian story, from Ashok Kumar Sen's proposal in the 1960s and L.M. Singhvi's coinage of the terms in 1963, through the first ARC's recommendation in 1966, the lapsed bill of 1968 and seven further attempts to 2001, the Venkatachaliah recommendation of 2002, the second ARC in 2005 and the India Against Corruption movement of 2011, is set out in the note on accountability, as are the provisions of the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013.

What belongs here is the assessment. The Act brings the Prime Minister within jurisdiction subject to exclusions and procedural safeguards; it requires every state to establish a Lokayukta; and it has been undermined by the long delay in making the first appointment, by dependence on government for staff and investigating machinery, by the absence of constitutional status, and by the composition of the selection committee, in which the executive it is meant to check predominates. The Lokayuktas vary enormously between states in jurisdiction, powers and effectiveness, and the strongest of them have been the ones given suo motu powers and an investigating agency of their own.

UNCAC and the Wider Legal Framework

The United Nations Convention against Corruption, adopted by the General Assembly in October 2003, is the only legally binding universal anti-corruption instrument. India signed it in 2005 and ratified it in May 2011. The Convention rests on four pillars, prevention, criminalisation and law enforcement, international cooperation and asset recovery, and some of its obligations are mandatory while others require states only to consider adopting them.

Pillar	Indian instruments
Prevention	Central Vigilance Commission Act, 2003, Right to Information Act, 2005, conduct rules, e-procurement and the Government e-Marketplace, direct benefit transfer
Criminalisation	Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, amended in 2018 to make bribe-giving a distinct offence, to make commercial organisations liable for bribes paid on their behalf, and to require trials to be completed ordinarily within two years
Enforcement and oversight	CBI, state anti-corruption bureaus, and the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013, under which the first Lokpal was appointed in 2019
Asset recovery	Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, Fugitive Economic Offenders Act, 2018, Benami Transactions (Prohibition) Amendment Act, 2016, and the Black Money (Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets) and Imposition of Tax Act, 2015
Reporting persons	Whistle Blowers Protection Act, 2014
International cooperation	Mutual legal assistance treaties and extradition arrangements

Where the Framework Falls Short

• Bribery of foreign public officials, a mandatory obligation under the Convention, is not an offence in Indian law, and the bill introduced for the purpose in 2011 lapsed.
• Private sector bribery, which the Convention asks states to consider criminalising, remains outside the Prevention of Corruption Act.
• Whistle-blower protection exists on paper, since the 2014 Act has not been brought into force, and an amending bill of 2015 that would have narrowed it lapsed.
• Section 17A of the amended Prevention of Corruption Act requires prior approval before any investigation into a decision taken by a public servant in official functions, which protects honest decision-making and also lets the government decide whether its own officers are investigated.
• Independence of investigators. The CBI depends on the government for its staffing and on state consent, and the Lokpal relies on borrowed investigating machinery.
• Political finance, which the Convention addresses among its preventive measures, remains opaque. In Association for Democratic Reforms v. Union of India (2024) the Supreme Court struck down the electoral bond scheme as violating the voter's right to information.

Zero Tolerance as a Multi-Pronged Approach

The government's zero tolerance policy combines law with process. On the legal side are the 2018 amendment, the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act and the enlarged use of the money laundering law, whose wide powers of arrest and attachment the Supreme Court upheld in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary v. Union of India (2022). On the process side are measures that remove discretion and personal contact: direct benefit transfer, e-auction of coal blocks and spectrum, faceless income tax assessment, the abolition of interviews for junior posts from 2016, the Government e-Marketplace, and compulsory retirement of officers of doubtful integrity under Fundamental Rule 56(j). The process reforms are the stronger part, because they remove the opportunity for corruption instead of relying on detection after the event.

The critique is that enforcement is seen as selective, with central agencies accused of pursuing opponents of the government more readily than its allies, that convictions in money laundering cases are few relative to arrests, that Section 17A and the unimplemented whistle-blower law weaken the system exactly where insiders would expose wrongdoing, and that the Lokpal has made little visible impact. Zero tolerance is credible only where the institutions applying it are seen to be independent of those they investigate.

Vigilance Administration

Vigilance administration is the internal machinery of integrity within each organisation, and it is where most cases begin and end.

Every ministry, department, attached and subordinate office and public undertaking has a vigilance unit headed by a Chief Vigilance Officer, who is appointed in consultation with the CVC and acts as its extension within the organisation while remaining an officer of that organisation, which is the arrangement's strength and its weakness at once.

The Three Functions

• Preventive vigilance: identifying the procedures, postings and points of discretion that generate corruption and redesigning them. Simplifying a procedure, publishing criteria, rotating officers in sensitive posts and reducing personal contact between official and applicant prevent more corruption than any number of prosecutions, and this is the part of the work most neglected.
• Punitive vigilance: investigating complaints, conducting departmental inquiries and recommending penalties, which is what the machinery is usually thought to be for.
• Surveillance and detection: maintaining lists of officers of doubtful integrity, scrutinising property returns, and watching sensitive posts.

Why It Underperforms

• The Chief Vigilance Officer is usually a serving officer of the same organisation, part-time in the role, reporting to a head who may himself be implicated.
• Departmental inquiries are slow, and the procedural protections of Article 311 make them slower, so that an officer under inquiry frequently retires before it concludes.
• Sanction for prosecution is required and is often delayed or refused, which is why the CVC was given the function of reviewing pending sanction applications, and why section 17A of the amended Prevention of Corruption Act is contested.
• Preventive vigilance requires changing systems that somebody benefits from, while punitive vigilance requires only pursuing an individual, so the machinery drifts towards the second.

What the Second ARC Recommended

• A National Counter-Terrorism Centre to check the financing of terrorism.
• A multi-pronged and comprehensive strategy involving many stakeholders, in which the executive, political parties, security agencies, civil society and the media all have a larger role.
• A specialised central investigation agency in every state, so that investigation becomes a distinct professional function rather than an adjunct of law and order duty.
• A Police Public Service Commission in every state to preserve the independence of police administration in recruitment and postings.
• Local courts in rural areas with populations of twenty-five thousand and above, to reform the criminal justice system from its base.
• A zero-tolerance strategy towards criminalisation in all public agencies.
• At least one-third representation of women in the police forces, which addresses both the custodial abuse problem and the reluctance of women to approach a police station.

Assessment

The state of law and order administration reflects several failures that reinforce one another. Maintenance of order and peace is the principal function of any government, and the performance of both the Union and the states is inadequate to the present situation. Because law and order is a State List subject, the Centre cannot intervene effectively even where a state's machinery has failed. The state police apparatus is stagnant and status-quo oriented, its investigative methods old and crude, complaints of third-degree methods and harassment accumulate, and officers are ill-equipped for communal riots, agitations and violent disorder.

Beyond the machinery lies the political condition the literature names directly: the criminalisation of politics and the politicisation of criminals, and the nexus between politicians, criminals and business, which has made the situation genuinely complex. The degradation of moral values and the passivity of integrative forces have contributed to it. Modern equipment is necessary and is not the answer.

The conclusion that an answer should reach is that India's difficulty in this field is not a shortage of recommendations. The National Police Commission reported in 1981, the Supreme Court directed implementation in 2006, the Model Police Act was drafted in 2006, the Malimath Committee reported in 2003 and the Mulla Committee in 1983, and the Acts of 1861 and 1894 still govern. Each of these instruments is useful to somebody in its unreformed condition, and reform has failed not because the diagnosis was absent but because the beneficiaries of the disease are the people who would have to enact the cure.