To bridge the huge shortfall of police personnel, the Home Ministry has requested the 13th Finance Commission to scale up resources of state governments with the specific objective of augmenting rural policing.

The Home Ministry has said that state governments need to recruit about 5.6 lakh additional police personnel to bring the police-population ratio in the country to a respectable level of 220 per one lakh people. Of these, nearly 3.4 lakh recruitments need to be made in the rural areas. The Ministry has estimated that to bridge the gap in the rural areas alone, the states would require additional resources of about Rs 20,000 crore every year.

India currently has a police-population ratio of about 126 per lakh people, way below the international standard of 226 per lakh. With most of the police personnel deployed in the cities, rural police stations are woefully short of manpower, an anomaly that has been haunting the state governments for quite some time now. States complain they don’t have resources to raise and maintain additional police personnel and are becoming dependent on paramilitary forces even to deal with simple law and order problems.

“Looking at the extraordinary shortage of police personnel in rural police stations, it may be worthwhile for the 13th Finance Commission to consider enabling the states by augmenting their resources in a manner that the rural policing is strengthened,” the Home Ministry said in its memorandum to the Finance Commission headed by Vijay Kelkar. Kelkar is expected to submit his report to the government by October, recommending allocation of resources between the Centre and the states from the fiscal year 2010-11.

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