India's Police Have Been Handed A New Job; Here Is How To Train For It - O.P. Singh

For a fortnight this month the country watched Indian policemen at work on television and watched them answer for that work afterwards. A constable with a bandage across his face. An officer at a barricade explaining, at short notice and without a brief, why his men wore no nameplates.

Set aside for a moment the rights and wrongs of any particular afternoon. Look instead at the job those men were doing. It is not the job they were trained for. It is a new one, and it arrived without an instruction manual.

The New Job Description

Consider who is now on the other side of the barricade.

India's median citizen is 29.2 years old. There are 1.03 billion internet users at roughly 70 per cent penetration and 1.06 billion mobile connections. This is a generation that has never known an unrecorded public encounter, that films by instinct, and that can broadcast what it films to more people in an hour than a district newspaper reached in a year.

None of that is a threat. It is simply the condition in which policing now happens, and it changes what the work demands.

Three demands in particular are new.

The policeman must be able to explain himself, in advance, to strangers. A dispersal that is announced, reasoned and warned is a different event — legally and in the public mind — from one that simply begins. Explanation used to be optional. It is now the most valuable minute of the day.

He must be able to work while recorded. Composure in front of a lens is a distinct skill. A man who behaves differently because a phone is pointed at him has not been trained; he has only been warned.

And he must be able to separate the few from the many, quickly and visibly. Most people in most gatherings come to be counted. A handful arrive intending to break something. Taking out the second without touching the first is now the whole craft — and doing it visibly is what protects both the crowd and the force.

The Encouraging Part

Here is what makes this a solvable problem rather than a lament: India already knows what those qualities are called and already tests for them at the top.

An IPS officer is selected through the Civil Services Examination. He writes an essay paper — 250 marks, no syllabus — in which he must build an argument and make a stranger follow him. He then faces a personality test worth 275 marks, in which the Union Public Service Commission states plainly what it is looking for: among other qualities, "clear and logical exposition" and "ability for social cohesion and leadership".

Read those two phrases against the three demands above. Exposition is the ability to explain. Social cohesion is the ability to hold people together, including people who are not yours to command. Nobody drafting that notification had a camera phone in mind, and yet it is close to a perfect specification for the officer this decade requires.

We are not choosing the wrong people. The design brief already exists, in our own examination.

Where The Design Stops Short

It stops in two places, and both are fixable.

It stops at the top. That examination selects a few thousand officers. The force is 20.3 lakh, and some 86 per cent of it is constabulary. The citizen rarely meets an IPS officer; he meets a constable at a barricade and a sub-inspector across a desk.

At that level, exposition and cohesion are not examined. Delhi Police's sub-inspector recruitment, to take one example, runs reasoning, general knowledge, quantitative aptitude and English comprehension, then physical tests and a medical. Most state boards use some version of the same design. It is a sound test of literacy, numeracy and fitness. It was simply never built to look for the two faculties the street now asks for.

And it stops at entry. Whatever an officer demonstrates on the day he is selected, very little afterwards asks him to demonstrate it again. He will write case diaries and endorsements, not explanations meant to persuade a reader. Training takes 1.25 per cent of the police budget nationally, according to the India Justice Report 2025.

Neither of those is anybody's failure. They are the ordinary result of a job description that changed faster than the system that staffs it.

The Force Is Already Asking

The most useful finding I have seen this year comes from the Status of Policing in India Report 2025, a survey of 8,276 police personnel across 82 locations in 16 states and Delhi.

Seventy-four per cent of them said training on human rights and the prevention of torture was very important.

That is not a public demanding reform of the police. That is the police asking for it. The same survey shows what tends to fill the vacuum where such training is absent — a majority of personnel accepting that tough methods are needed to create public fear. Those two findings belong together. Men who have not been given a method will use the one they have.

A Working Prototype

None of this needs to wait for a commission.

As Director General of Police in Haryana in 2025, I made a small rule for myself. IPS officers in their first years of service would, by rotation, accompany me through the ordinary day — the officers' meeting, the personal hearing where citizens aggrieved by the police come to be heard, and the visits to the state secretariat and to senior bureaucratic and political formations.

The intention was to demystify headquarters and secretariat, to give young officers the confidence to stand in such a room, absorb and eventually speak up, and to let them see early that an Indian police career floats between headquarters and field, so that neither reads as exile nor as reward.

The personal hearing was worth the most. A young officer at the back of that room watches a citizen describe what the police did to him and watches the head of the force answer. That is exposition and cohesion being practised in real conditions, at no cost to any budget and without taking a single man off the ground.

Its limitation is equally plain. It rested on one man's habit, and it reached officers rather than constables — which is the larger half of the force.

What A Police Chief Can Do Without Asking Anyone

Most of this needs no sanction, no budget line and no new law. It sits squarely within the authority a Director General already holds.

Put composure under a camera into the state academy. Every probationer faces a hostile question with a recording light on, is shown the footage, and does it again. Twice a month for the length of the course produces a generation that does not freeze. The academy is his; the change is a timetable entry.

Make the weekly debrief a standing order. Ninety minutes, run by the officer in charge, in the open, without punishment attached. It is the cheapest continuous training available anywhere in the Indian government, and it reaches the constabulary, which classroom courses never will.

Make apprenticeship a duty rather than a preference. What I did in Haryana should not depend on who holds the chair. A standing instruction that every senior officer carries his juniors through the ordinary week — the meeting, the hearing, the secretariat — survives the man who issued it.

What Needs One Decision From A State Government

Add a single component to constable and sub-inspector selection. A short structured interview, or a written situational exercise: how would you explain a police action to an unhappy citizen? It need not be elaborate, and it need not lengthen the process by a day. This is the one measure on the list that reaches 86 per cent of the force, and it is the one a chief cannot make on his own — police recruitment boards answer to the state government, and the change is a decision, not an expenditure.

And add one line to the appraisal. As long as a record shows only detections and arrests, the patient work of explanation stays invisible in a man's file. A line for community engagement and public communication changes behaviour faster than any syllabus. It costs nothing and requires only that a government agree to count it.

We wrote this plan in 1971

On November 10, 1971, the Government of India constituted a committee on police training under Professor M.S. Gore. It reported that training should be treated as a continuous process — refresher, specialist, promotion and orientation courses at every rank — and that money spent on it was an investment in human resources rather than an overhead.

Fifty-one years later, in February 2022, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs asked in almost the same words for soft skills and behavioural change.

We do not need new thinking. We need to implement an Indian committee's own recommendation, and the cost of doing so is small: moving training from 1.25 per cent of the police budget to three would still leave it the smallest line on the page.

Three of the five measures above can be ordered by a Director General next Monday. The other two need a single decision from a state government, and neither of them requires money.

The generation now filling our streets is not the adversaries of the Indian police. It is simply the public the Indian police now serve — younger, quicker, better connected, and entirely willing to be persuaded by anyone who takes the trouble to explain.

We already know what that officer looks like. We wrote him into our own examination. All that remains is to train him and to train the eighty-six per cent who were never asked.

About the Author: O.P. Singh is a former Director General of Police, Haryana. Views expressed are personal.

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