Our electronic media finds it fashionable and useful (apropos of TRP ratings) to criticise India’s police and intelligence services after every terrorist bomb blast. I wonder how many of our TV anchors have actually visited a police station.

Not one of them is air-conditioned (air-conditioning is not a luxury; it improves the productivity of the working staff exponentially); the toilets are grim, primitive and dirty; the paper forms are obsolete and incomprehensible; sometimes they run short of paper and ask you to write the complaint on “your own” paper in long-hand; hardly any of them have computers; where computers exist, they usually do not work due to “electricity power cuts” or sundry other reasons; the computers are not networked; there are no scanners to scan fingerprints; there are no digital cameras to photograph suspects and digitise the images; there are no video cameras to obtain quick depositions from complainants and witnesses; there is no intelligent work-flow software to hand over tasks from one employee to another. Above all, there is no networking; there is no centralised data base within a town let alone across the state or across the whole country. This means that if I commit a crime in one neighbourhood and move to another, I can literally “start afresh”; the laborious manual process of files going back and forth before my identity is established as the “same” criminal can take months and years although current (why current, even 10-year-old) technology makes that possible in minutes and seconds.

... contd.