Twenty Years After Prakash Singh — The Reform That Was Ordered and Never Delivered

Pritiraj BrahmaFounding Partner, Pritiraj & Partners · 19 February 2026

The Supreme Court directed seven police reforms in 2006. Two decades on, forces run at roughly a fifth understrength and 86% of the state police is constabulary with one promotion in a career.

India has a police reform. It was ordered by the Supreme Court in 2006, it is binding, and it has largely not been implemented. That is a fact about our institutions, not about our police.

In Prakash Singh v. Union of India (2006), the Supreme Court issued seven directives to the states: constitute a State Security Commission to insulate the police from illegitimate political pressure; give the Director General of Police a minimum two-year tenure through a transparent selection process; fix tenure for operational field officers; separate investigation from law and order; establish a Police Establishment Board to decide transfers and postings; create Police Complaints Authorities at state and district level; and set up a National Security Commission.

Twenty years on, most states have complied on paper — commissions constituted, boards notified — while the substance, particularly on tenure security and independent complaints authorities, has been diluted through state legislation and executive practice. Colonial-era policing law, the Police Act of 1861, remained the operative framework in much of the country long after a model replacement was drafted in 2006.

Four findings anchor this analysis:

1. The force has been chronically understrength for over a decade. Bureau of Police Research and Development data shows total sanctioned posts rising from 21.2 lakh in 2012 to 26.8 lakh in 2022, with actual strength at 20.9 lakh — leaving 5.95 lakh vacancies. Vacancies have exceeded five lakh every single year across that period; the rate has moved only from about 25 to 22 per cent.
2. Density remains well below the international benchmark. PRS analysis records sanctioned strength at 181 police per lakh persons in 2016 against actual strength of 137, with the United Nations recommended standard at 222 per lakh. Recruitment has since improved the ratio, but the shortfall is structural rather than cyclical.
3. The force is overwhelmingly constabulary with almost no career. About 86 per cent of state police is constabulary; constables are typically promoted once in a service life and generally retire as head constables. An organisation in which nine of ten members have one promotion available to them has no meaningful performance incentive.
4. The investigation function is the one that suffers. The 2006 directive to separate investigation from law and order exists precisely because the two compete for the same officer. Where they are not separated, order duties — bandobast, VIP security, election deployment — always win, because they are visible and immediate, while investigation quality is neither.

Why compliance on paper produced so little

The Prakash Singh directives were an unusual instrument: a court prescribing organisational design to executive governments. That is also why implementation has been weak, and the reason is worth naming plainly rather than moralising about.

Each directive removes a specific discretion from the political executive. Fixed DGP tenure removes the power to replace an inconvenient chief. A Police Establishment Board deciding transfers removes the single most-used lever of control over an individual officer in India — the threat of a posting. An independent complaints authority removes the ability to manage an allegation internally. The reforms were resisted not because they were badly designed but because they were correctly designed, and no government of any party has volunteered to give up those levers.

This is the general lesson. Reforms that redistribute administrative discretion away from the political executive do not fail on capacity. They fail on consent, and they will keep failing until the constituency for them is broader than the courts.

The honest counter-case

Two arguments cut the other way. First, policing is a State subject under the Seventh Schedule, and there is a genuine federal objection to a uniform national template imposed by judicial direction — states differ enormously in geography, crime profile and political culture. Second, several states have made real gains that the compliance scorecard misses: dial-112 integration, forensic capacity, women's help desks and beat-level digitisation have measurably improved response in some jurisdictions.

Both are fair. Neither addresses the two findings that matter most: a fifth of the sanctioned force does not exist, and the officer who investigates your case has no protected tenure in the post.

What we would do

1. Recruit against a published rolling plan, not an episodic drive. A vacancy rate stable at roughly a fifth for a decade is not a recruitment failure; it is the absence of a recruitment system. Publish annual intake requirements five years forward, and report against them.
2. Build a career for the constabulary. Three assured promotion opportunities in a service life, tied to examination and performance rather than seniority alone. This is the single largest untapped source of policing quality in India, and it costs a fraction of what technology programmes cost.
3. Separate investigation genuinely, with its own cadre and its own head. A separate investigation wing that cannot be pulled onto bandobast duty is the operative test. Everything else is a notification.
4. Publish transfer decisions. Whatever the Establishment Board decides, publishing every transfer with the reason attached would do more to constrain arbitrary posting than any further litigation.
5. Fund the Police Complaints Authorities properly, or admit they do not function. A complaints body without staff, budget or the power to compel is worse than none, because it certifies the absence of redress as the presence of it.

India did not fail to design police reform. It designed it, had it ordered by its highest court, and then declined to hand over the discretion the reform required. Two decades of that is a finding about how Indian institutions actually change — and about what it will take to change them.