Look at the next policeman you pass. Cap on the dashboard, shirt loose at the back, belt slack, boots grey. He may be a brave man with twenty years of good service. The citizen approaching him cannot know that, and decides in two seconds.

We read that scene in one of two ways, and both are wrong. Contempt — look at the state of our police. Or pity — the man works fourteen hours, leave him alone.

Take the pity seriously, because it is the excuse the service has accepted for forty years, and it no longer holds.

In Haryana a policeman draws thirteen months of salary in a twelve-month year. He has uniform and travel allowances, rides state buses free, borrows at rates no private employee can obtain. His children have police schools; he has quarters, community halls and playgrounds inside the lines. His salary account carries a one-crore accidental death cover — paid not by the exchequer but by the bank that holds the force’s accounts, under a memorandum with the department. If he dies on duty, a dependent gets a government job.

Set that beside a young man of the same schooling in a private job in Gurugram — no pension, no tenure, no housing, no settlement if a lorry kills him on the way to work. The overtime is not unpaid. It is paid, in a thirteenth month and a package no comparable worker receives.

The hours are not humane; the fourteen-hour day is a real scandal. But the harder truth is this: we have already tried paying our way out, and it did not press a single shirt.

So what is missing? It has a number nobody quotes. The India Justice Report of 2025 found 21 per cent of constable posts vacant — and among officers, every rank from Assistant Sub-Inspector upwards, 28 per cent.

The supervisory layer of the Indian police is emptier than the layer it is meant to supervise.

That explains the crossing. The man who should hold the roll call is himself one of the missing; the officer who should take the orderly room is covering two sub-divisions. We did not decide to stop supervising. We built a force in which supervision is the first thing dropped, then called the result a discipline problem.

And turnout is not vanity. In Bickman’s classic experiment, a researcher in a police-style uniform with a badge and no weapon gave orders to strangers in the street — and they obeyed, and went on obeying after he walked away. The cloth did all of it. The same literature finds that a creased uniform and a worn belt signal complacency — that this officer can be tested.

The solutions are not exotic.

Restore the four practices that hold a force together. The roll call — the one moment in a day when a man is looked at before he is sent out, and told what the district holds. The Monday parade — the force seeing itself, the supervisor inspected in the open. The orderly room — the grievance forum we already own. Bada khana — the one place a constable and a Superintendent sit without a file between them.

I insisted on all four in Haryana. I also went after the furniture. Three things had to go: the enormous table, six feet of polished wood between an officer and anyone who comes to him; the towel draped over his chair, announcing that the chair belongs to the man and not to the state; and the visitor’s chair — in most police offices the worst chair in the building, low, broken-backed, set to one side, so that a citizen sits beneath the man he has come to see and knows it before either speaks. A room says what a uniform says, and it says it first. None of it costs money.

But rituals need people to conduct them, which brings me to the measure that matters most. Officer recruitment takes years — advertisement, examination, result, training, litigation. We cannot wait out three recruitment cycles while a quarter of the supervisory chairs stay empty.

For the next three years, every vacancy in the direct-recruit officer quota should be filled by promotion from the ranks.

Not a token quota. All of them, for a fixed announced period, on merit, through departmental examination and a board. It costs nothing — the posts are already sanctioned. It puts a supervisor in the chair in months, not years. And it hands the constabulary what no welfare scheme ever has: a visible ladder.

It would also do something the public feels directly. The law draws a hard line at the constable’s rank — the code defines an officer-in-charge as one “above the rank of constable” (Section 2(1)(s) of the BNSS, the old Section 2(o)) — so a constable, whatever his ability, cannot be an investigating officer or sign a charge sheet. One rank up, the line breaks: Assistant Sub-Inspectors, and in several states Head Constables for specified offences, investigate and file final reports. The bulk of the force stands one promotion away from the legal capacity to investigate. Every constable promoted crosses that statutory line — a new investigating officer from manpower we already employ. Vacant officer posts are not empty chairs at a parade. They are investigations nobody is conducting, in a country where trials wait years for a charge sheet.

There is a working model. In England and Wales every officer begins as a constable and holds that office throughout his career — every chief constable there once walked a beat, and promotion runs by competitive examination. It has produced supervisors who know what they are supervising, because they have done it.

The objection is predictable: promotees lack the breadth of direct recruits. Some will. That is what the examination and the board are for. And the comparison is not between a promotee and a direct recruit. It is between a promotee and an empty chair, and an empty chair supervises nobody.

Wilson and Kelling told us in 1982 that one unrepaired window announces that nobody is in charge. We taught that theory to our men and never turned it on ourselves. The unpressed uniform is our broken window. It tells the citizen nobody inside is watching. It tells the man wearing it the same thing — and at present he is right.

Fill the chairs. A force that is inspected does not need to be told to stand straight. / DAILY WORLD /

( The writer is a former Director General of Police, Haryana. Views are personal..)