The police forces of India have grown by a whopping 32 per cent in the last 10 years, but women only make up 10.5 per cent of the force across all states and union territories. These findings were reported by the India Justice Report (IJR) titled ‘Police: Improvements, Shortfalls and National Trends’–a report curated by a number of organisations that work towards the improvement of the justice sector including Centre for Social Justice, Common Cause, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, DAKSH, TISS–Prayas, the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy and How India Lives.
The study also found that only one in three stations in the country is armed with a CCTV camera, despite the Minister of State Affairs Nityanand Rai’s clear directions last year to the States and UTs for the installation of CCTV cameras in all police stations and offices of central investigation agencies.
According to this annual report–which is published every year since 2019–it took 15 years for the per cent of women in the force to increase from 3.3 to 10.5. Even though the governments at the Union, State and UT levels have accepted diversity in their police forces, among the states that have reservations for SC, STs and OBCs, only Karnataka has met its reserved quotas in 2020.
Among the 17 States and UTs that have been instructed 33 per cent of their police force to comprise of women, none have achieved their targets. Tamil Nadu set a target of 30 per cent but has only 19.4 per cent women, Bihar was supposed to have 38 per cent but is currently at 17.4 per cent, and Gujarat set aside 33 per cent of its force for women but is lagging at 16 per cent.
The report also mentions that 41 per cent of the country’s police stations have yet to get help desks for women. The only state with these across all police stations is Tripura meanwhile Arunachal Pradesh has none. The women’s help desk at any police station is supposed to be the first and single point of contact for any women walking into a police station.