Address at the Inauguration of the 37th All India Police Science Congress, Bangalore

National Development: Police a Partner

"Internal security is the foundation of the nation"

I am delighted to participate in the inauguration of 37th All India Police Science Congress. My greetings to all the delegates coming from various States and Union Territories, members of the legal community, academicians, judicial experts, scientists and technologists and other distinguished invitees. I have selected the topic for this lecture "National Development: Police a Partner".

Our National mission - challenges

Our nation is going through a major challenge of uplifting of 260 million people who are below the poverty line and also to give better life for many millions who are on the border line of poverty or just above the poverty line. They need decent habitat, they need education, they need employment with reasonable income, they need food, they need health care, and finally resulting into a good life. Our GDP is growing at more than 8% per annum on an average. Whereas, the economists suggest that to uplift the people from below the poverty line, our economy has to grow at the rate of 10% per annum consistently, for over a decade.

Integrated action: To meet the need of one billion people, we have the mission of transforming India into a developed nation by 2020. We have identified five areas where India has a core competence for integrated action: (1) Agriculture and food processing (2) Reliable and Quality Electric power, Surface transport and Infrastructure for all parts of the country. (3) Education and Healthcare (4) Information and Communication Technology (5) Strategic sectors. These five areas are closely inter-related and if properly implemented, will lead to food, economic and national security of our country. Police forces are the important components of national development. The economic development leads to certain dynamic changes in the society. Hence there will be a continuous demand on Police force to meet the challenges of dynamics of the society.

Engines for Growth: Emphasis should be on full utilization of natural and human resources of the nation to meet the demands of the modern society. We should also remember that about 50% of our population is young people with aspirations for better living. Value addition to Agriculture, Manufacturing and Service sectors, building the national core competence and technologies will lead to additional high income employment potential. The engines for growth will be accelerated by launching of the five national missions viz. water, energy, education and skills, infrastructure and employment generation that will enable achievement of 10% GDP growth rate per annum. It is possible to do so with ecological and economic sustainability.

With these aspects, we have already laid down the road map. The priority for the government is to convert the road map into various missions. While converting the vision into different missions we seem to have many thoughts and variety of routes to reach the goal. This is where there is a need to have a coherent thinking among all the members of the society, including the police force. All of us have to think that the nation is greater than an individual or an organization. All of us should believe, that "we can do it". The police force is indeed a partner in the Developed India missions.

What can be the vision of our Police force?

Police has an important role to play in realizing the objectives of competitive India, which we discussed. I would like to present certain specific challenges regarding the police force. Also, I would like to give an ideal profile of Police force, which will play a pivotal role in the transformation of India to a developed nation.

Nobility of Management: Our police force needs to be a friendly, corruption free, responsible, tolerant to ambiguity and pressure, caring for the people with a sense of compassion and empathy, able to create confidence and win over the hearts of the people, be efficient and time conscious, stress tolerant, mentally and physically fit and robust, able to provide high quality leadership potential at all levels of hierarchy and be a model for conduct and discipline. High stress and heavy work are demanded everyday from Police Constables. Police stations are ought to be equipped with minimum utility and operational facilities and safety in difficult areas. It is the responsibility of the senior leaders to ensure that periodic training to the police constable including foreign trainings is organized and the police stations are equipped with the operational amenities and connectivity. The accountability flows from highest level of the police force to the police constable. Hence, the nobility of management has to flow from the top. This I have experienced and seen during my work with various organizations, the noble leaders radiate their way of life to all members of their teams.

Professionalism and modernization: As you are aware, during the last two decades, considerable growth and advancement has taken place in many technology areas relevant to police operations. These include Information and Communication technology, networking, transportation, riot control devices, interrogation techniques and forensic investigations. There is a need for progressive induction of Voice over IP system with state-of-the-art security for police communication. Also, we should have the data of habitual criminals with finger printing, DNA printing and other personal particulars like place of birth, name of parents, date of birth etc. online available to all police stations through a wide area network.

The video conferencing offered has to be used in a big way. This saves enormous amount of expenditure and the unnecessary movement of police personnel guarding under- trials and avoids unpleasant incidents that would have happened during the transit. The Police Congress may take the initiative of suggesting the multi-media conferencing facility from the central prisons to some of the district courts in order to ensure that time and money are not spent only for the production of under-trials before the court.

There is a need to provide adequate training to the personnel at different levels to improve the professionalism and enhance the operational efficiency of the system as a whole. This aspect must be kept in mind while augmenting the police force, which I have talked to you earlier. It may also be useful to consider exposing our police force to the international models where modernization has already taken place. This will enable faster assimilation of the technology and further improvement, where we can do better being a late starter. The concern must be the innovative approach to the application of sophisticated technologies in the operations.

Challenges in today's communication

In the scene of cross border terrorism, our nation's capabilities; such as communication, rail and business infrastructure become exposed and vulnerable. In this scenario, the intelligence agencies and the police have to take an integrated approach. The people, who threaten our security and our peace, often can intermix with our public and may become indistinguishable. They use very high end technologies, much the same way as any common public could use, such as cell phone. When the attacker is distributed within the system, things become extremely difficult to detect and arrest. Innovative flow charts have to be evolved with experience to find how this phenomenon is taking place and how the intelligence agencies can match.

Open source intelligence

One of the major revolutions of information has been the advent of the World Wide Web. It contains a vast amount of information about people, corporate and nations. In the earlier days the intelligence information used to be gathered by field officers, working directly near the source of information. But today an intelligent mining of the data coming out in many newspapers, websites and so on, can give you ample information about possible groups, their intentions and their connectivities. A regular monitoring of the internet, could give you indicators of pre-formation activities of terrorists groups and their origins and their supporters.

Earth observations by Google Earth, most of you may or may not be aware that the high resolutions pictures are freely available on the internet provided by many sites including www.fas.org and Google earth. You will realize that some of the developing countries, which are already in danger of terrorist attacks, have been singularly chosen to provide such high resolutions about them. When you look deeper into it, you would realize that the specific laws in some countries, regarding spatial observations over their territory and UN recommendations about the display of spatial observations is inadequate. I would urge all of you to discuss amongst yourself and come up with the possible solutions for the Government to take up.

Cyber crimes

Economic prosperity by 2020 will also mean that many of the Indians will be doing business in the digital world on the web. In this new era, crime, law and justice will be completely different from the present. In the present law, for example, the jurisdiction will correspond to the location where the crime is committed and where the damage occurs ? very often both being the same location. Whereas in the digital world, the crime may originate from a strange place even outside our own shores and may damage organizational wealth which will be in the digital form in multiple locations. In the 20th century, a nation?s business transactions and wealth creation were based on transfer of materials (atoms) from one place to the other. In the 21st century wealth is created whenever information in the form of electrons is transferred across the networks in a borderless world. Our police system has to build its capacity to define jurisdictions in a way that any crime committed against India or her assets by anyone from anywhere shall be punishable by Indian law. It may be true for other countries also. The police community must enable formulation of progressive and innovative crime detection systems for the digital economy that will be one of the vital components of a developed nation. Cyber crime being technology driven it needs unique training system for detection and prevention. Women police personnel are the most suited for prevention of such crimes.

What are our concerns?

I would like to share with you some of the immediate concerns which I have been getting through the interaction with the people, e-mails, and from other sources. The women in the country generally feel that they are not safe, particularly their movement outside after sunset. In addition, there are a number of incidences of violence against women in many forms. Kidnapping, abduction and extortion has become a common practice in many parts of the country. Inter-state gangs launch themselves and conduct day light robbery and mercenary action. Problem of alienation has lead to terrorism and naxalism that has spread to many states. Several methods are found by individuals and groups to create large scale scam and frauds in different parts of the country. Even educational institutions and medical institutions are not spared like leakage of question papers. Every election witnesses an episode of criminal attack on candidates, booth capturing, tampering with ballot boxes and methods to disturb the democratic election process. Of course, the situation is gradually improving. No one wants to be a witness due to the sense of insecurity and lack of confidence in the system. The jurisdiction issue many times results in not filing the FIR in time and gives the opportunity to the criminal to destroy all the evidence in the interim period.

Possible Solutions

I have been thinking some of the possible solutions which I would like to put forth for the consideration of police and other related departments for enhancing the image and the efficiency of our Police force.

Police force augmentation: I understand that in our country the present Police to People ratio stand at 1:938 whereas in UK the ratio is 1:412. There is definitely a message in this for augmenting the police force so that we reach at least to a ratio of 1:500 within the next three to five years with various challenges in front of you. Technology can be used to optimize the size of the police force further. When we augment the force we have to ensure that the quality of the force through employing suitable modern psychometric and psychological methods of personality assessment and subsequently imparting adequate training including those of developing and nurturing the qualities required for an ideal police force, which I have already mentioned.

Recruitment and Service Conditions: To attract and retain talented youth in the Police Force right from constable to officers, what we need is to design an attractive service conditions with suitable pay package and perks, career planning and advancement, housing, leave, children education, healthcare facilities and self upgradation schemes. The pay package must be attractive enough to see that the police personnel at all levels will not succumb to extraneous consideration at any cost. While augmenting the Police force care may be taken to ensure that at least 10% of the police force is represented by women.

Training: The key to a successful police force lies in post-induction training and periodic upgradation of skills, technological skills and leadership skills at all stages of the career of the individual. The aim of the training should be to provide a cultural change among the total force through value based training, where ethical and moral values are also imparted. The organizational culture and behaviour should be made conducive to nurture and promote the values which are taught in the training institutions. The training package may include multi-level gender sensitive training to both women and men as a part of induction training to promote better understanding between men and women as a complementary force with a common objective. They should become life long learners and autonomous leaders at all levels of Police organisation. The training package should improve the psychological approach to crime prevention and rehabilitation of delinquents. The rehabilitated delinquent may perhaps become ambassadors of peace and security promoters.

Motivation and organizational culture: The police force needs to promote an organizational culture where the concept of reward and punishment becomes the spirit of functioning of the organisation. This will be needed to sustain the motivation level of the personnel in the organisation. The physical fitness is an important pre-requisite for the smart police force. The training should ensure that the physical, mental and spiritual well-being becomes the part of the life style of police personnel. In view of the emerging stressful operations and overload, adequate rest and recuperation measures have to be planned as a part of the work schedule while deploying the police force in demanding activities.

Research input for Training

The Police Science Congress may like to consider promotion of research in the areas of police intelligence, police administration, police management and networking. Our police stations spread across the country have to deal with different types of problems based on the characteristics and dynamics of the region. The Police Science Congress can ask the participants to provide a case study relating to the special problems of the region, psychology of the police personnel, psychology of the people of the region, characteristics of the crime, technological inputs provided and connectivity between the regional police network with higher levels. These case studies should be able to bring out the common approach to crime management, and the special training needs of the personnel in the region for crime detection, apprehension and control. The conduct of such case studies periodically will result in providing innovative solutions to certain problems. Certain crimes are not with reference to a particular district, they are national and at times international. The case studies should govern the interface problems in such situations also. Hundred case studies in a particular year should be documented with possible solutions that should be the training package for both police officers and constables. The case studies should become part of the training programme in the different States in the State Police Training Institutions.

Conclusion

I would like to conclude my address with the following five suggestions for the members participating in the 37th All India Police Science Congress.

1. Generating an action plan for progressive introduction of ICT in the police forces and establishment of e-governance system for police. It is essential to establish a police e-governance Grid through high bandwidth network.

2. Suggesting the psychological testing package to be included in the recruitment process of the police forces. Also, suggesting methods for improving the self-esteem of all police personnel based on real life case studies.

3. Planning for a nationwide database of criminals to be available online at all police stations. It should be updated continuously.

4. Designing a gender sensitization training programme to all police personnel with an objective to bring out the strengths of men and women individually and how both of them can collaborate effectively and contribute to the common goals of the organization. Such training should also address the special needs of women police and how the system has to pay attention to maintain harmony in the society.

5. Studying the feasibility of facilitating VVIP movements in rural / urban areas through the use of modern technology without holding up the normal traffic for unduly long hours. I have witnessed, during my visit to various countries, real time traffic regulation by a team of six members motor cycle outriders. This system can be studied and introduced for minimizing the inconvenience to the public.

I inaugurate the 37th All India Police Science Congress and my best wishes to all participants of this Congress for success in their mission of facilitating the evolution of state-of-the-art security system of 2020 through their deliberations.

May God bless you.