Police modernisation has been a subject of prolonged discussion for many years now. What is the status today?

Realising modernisation by or of the police forces is not a one-time goal. The police forces are required to be trained and equipped with emerging techniques and skills as and when the situation demands. Despite the fact that the ‘police’ and ‘public order’ fall in the State List of the Seventh Schedule of our Constitution, the Central government has been assisting the state police forces in strengthening their infrastructure through its various schemes.

Of all the schemes, the Modernisation of Police Forces (MPF) scheme has proved to be very useful in improving the basic security infrastructure of the police forces by making provision for procurement of modern weapons, vehicles, telecommunication, training and security equipment etc and also in upgrading state FSLs including Cyber and DNA labs. A few states have also implemented schemes like Intelligent Traffic Management System (ITMS), City Surveillance etc to provide efficient services to its citizens. The only matter of some concern is that not only the overall size of the MPF scheme is shrinking every year; the Centre-State ratio of finance sharing has also been changed to 60:40; resulting in extra burden to the states’ exchequer.

The Central government has also, inter alia, implemented its mission mode project - Crime Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) across the states to computerise and network all police stations of the country to improve transparency and accountability. This project has now made it possible to search the antecedents of a suspect or details of a vehicle involved in crime against the whole national database. The Supreme Court’s (SC) directive to upload FIRs within 24 to 72 hours on the official website could be executed only because the CCTNS platform was already available, and the states had to just develop an additional application.

The recent launch of the ‘one emergency number - 112’ across the states for citizens (instead of 100 for Police, 108 for Ambulance and 101 for Fire) to reach out to any of the emergency services like police, fire or health, is another feather in the cap of the government. Here also, the Central government has extended some financial assistance to the states. The C-DAC has helped in developing a unique mobile application ‘dial-112’ so that a citizen (of any state) in need can avail of an emergency service in any of the states irrespective of the variety of system integrators (SIs) implementing such emergency handling projects in differ