Restoring a semblance of worklife balance
The Mumbai police will work eight-hour shifts. Other forces must follow suit
For the first time in its 154-year history, the Mumbai police have switched to a compact eight-hour duty schedule for certain ranks, police commissioner Datta Padsalgikar announced on Wednesday. The police force in India, often accused of inefficiency, rudeness and corruption, is overworked and understaffed. The country was short of more than half a million police officers on January 1, 2015, the latest date for which nationwide data is available, the Lok Sabha was told in July, 2016. There were 17.2 million police officers across 36 states and Union Territories, when there should have been 22.6 million.
A 2015 study, ‘National Requirement of Manpower for EightHour Shift in Police Stations,’ carried out by the Bureau of Police Research and Development found that 90% of police officers worked for more than eight hours a day, and 73% didn’t get a weekly off even once a month. In 2005, a committee under Soli Sorabjee recommended a draft Model Police Act that delineated the social responsibilities of the police governed by the principles of impartiality and human rights norms, with special attention to the protection of weaker sections. In 2006, the Supreme Court, responding to a PIL filed by former Uttar Pradesh director general of police Prakash Singh, issued guidelines to the states which included a clear segregation of law and order and crime functions of the police. More than a decade later, few of these reforms have percolated to the ground level. Last year, frustrated over the slow pace of police reforms, former Chief Justice JS Khehar complained: “Police reforms are going on and on. Nobody listens to our orders.”
In light of this bleak history, the Mumbai police’s initiative to restore a semblance of work-life balance to the lives of its personnel should be appreciated – and wherever possible, replicated. That’s the least we owe to the men and women who have no fixed days off and can be called to work at any hour of the day or night.