Bengaluru’s big cop crunch

Earlier this month, the joyous celebrations over a cricket team’s maiden title win were marred by a madding crowd that rushed to a stadium in Bengaluru, costing 11 fans their lives.

Amidst the blame game that ensued, a cautionary letter surfaced in the media, purportedly written by the police officer-in-charge of security arrangements at the Vidhana Soudha, from where the celebrations began.

Amongst the multiple grounds flagged in this missive sent to the State Government, the shortage of security personnel was a prominent one.

Although the express concern was about the lack of adequate time to deploy additional personnel from outside the city to regulate the milling crowds, it hints at a deeper malaise that has plagued every state and Union Territory since independence. It is the ever-present gap between sanctioned strength (number of posts created) and actual strength (number of posts filled up) in the police services.

According to the 2025 India Justice Report, since 2022, Karnataka registered the steepest decline in the number of vacant police positions among states with large populations. Nevertheless, the state’s Home Minister admitted to the existence of more than 18,500 vacancies in March this year. Bengaluru City Police alone is said to have about 3,000 vacancies. Yet, merely filling up vacant posts might not solve the problem, though it is certainly the first step.

While commenting about police performance, most of us rarely ask this question – are there norms that guide police staffing? While sifting through the website of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (C&AG), last year, I came across their report of the audit of Delhi Police’s human resource requirements conducted just before the 2020 pandemic hit us. The C&AG used manpower norms developed by the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D) to assess staffing adequacy in the national capital. BPR&D is the research arm of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs on matters of the police, prisons and correctional institutions, and other internal security matters.

According to the RTI Act, these norms ought to have been disclosed voluntarily on BPR&D’s website but they were treated like sarkari secrets until last year. In October 2024, I submitted an RTI application to BPR&D. Copies of the norms for staffing, allocation of finances, and allotment of motor vehicles for urban and rural police stations as well as those based in areas affected by Left Wing Extremism were sought. BPR&D’s knee-jerk reaction was to deny that they had any of this information.

So, a first appeal was filed citing segments from the C&AG’s report which specifically mentioned BPR&D’s norms. Thankfully, in January this year, the appellate authority directed the disclosure of staffing norms only, upon payment of Rs 298/- as photocopying charges.

The staffing and other related norms for urban and rural policing were developed by BPR&D committees between 2009 and 2013 after studying various kinds of duties performed in police stations and other departmental offices in Chandigarh and the Raghunathpally PS in Telangana. The methodology of assessing the workload of these police stations itself deserves more than quadruple the space of this column. Nevertheless, for rural police stations, the BPR&D committee assessed that they ought to have a minimum of 114 personnel to attend to various official duties. As for urban police stations, the committee recommended numerical strengths corresponding to each officially assigned task.

Interestingly, in 2014, Bengaluru-based NGO Janagraha released a civil society assessment of staffing requirements in police stations using a model that focused on the number of hours and days that police personnel invested in or required for performing their appointed duties such as beats, investigation of each type of crime, escort duty, warrant duty, police verification and a host of others. Detailed assessment including police-population ratio and in-depth interviews with personnel deployed at two police stations in Bengaluru resulted in the study recommending a requirement of 412 personnel in one of them and 540 in the other. Going by this decade-old study alone, the staffing strength of Bengaluru City Police will require ramping up by almost four times (from a sanctioned strength of about 23,000 to the required strength of more than 80,000). The requirement for 2025 is not known, with the city’s population burgeoning from 9.7 million in 2014 to an estimated 14 million in 2024. It is high time the authorities moved beyond making banal excuses for security lapses, to tackling the city’s policing problem scientifically, using these studies as the starting point.