The Ground Still Exists - O. P. Singh

Somewhere in Haryana tonight a mother is sitting up with a son who is using drugs. She has done what mothers do — prayed, hidden the money, threatened, and wept. Then she did the thing the government exists for. She asked the sarpanch, the schoolmaster, and a constable whose face she knows from the market.

What happens to her next is the whole of governance. Not the policy, not the budget, not the strategy. Whether somebody came.

I thought about her this week in an apex-level meeting on drug strategy. The people in the room were able and sincere, and most of the day went into enlarging the problem — the supply across the border, the chemists, the networks, the numbers. Till the building was too tall to climb, and the mother was not in it.

That is how such rooms work. But the mother has an address, and the drug that reached her son crossed three state lines to get there. The gap between a problem that moves and a citizen who cannot is the subject of this essay.

Where The Sensitivity Comes From

I did not come to the government from the government's side of the counter. Where I grew up, the state was more a problem than a solution — a place you went when there was no choice and came back from with a date to return. In the school, the headmaster's son had a birthright to stand first in the class, whatever his talent. Everything around you expected the size of your dream to fit the stratum you were born into.

I joined the service with that memory and never lost it. In every posting the question I kept asking was the citizen's: what is this like from the other side of the table?

Two Counters

Anyone who has dealt with the State knows its two sides.

When a crime carries a law-and-order shadow — a murder that could put a crowd on the highway by evening — the State drives straight and fast. Teams form within the hour, the procedure gives way to pace, and the result arrives before the procedure is written up. I drove that way many times, and nobody in the district asked to see the file.

When a citizen needs a caste certificate, a correction in a land record, or compensation for a field that was acquired from his father, the same state sends him round. Form, affidavit, verification, the file collecting signatures, and the seasons change. Honest officers do this, for a reason: here the procedure protects them, and the result belongs to nobody.

So the State hurries where it enforces and dawdles where it serves. The citizen wants the reverse. At the tehsil, he wants the thing and does not care about the form. At the police station he wants fairness and will accept a result he dislikes if the dealing was clean.

Research puts numbers to that instinct. Tom Tyler's surveys of New Yorkers found fair dealing shaped the legitimacy of the police about three times as heavily as effectiveness at catching criminals. A Harvard team working with the city of Boston found residents shown the city's unfixed backlog of complaints trusted it exactly as much as those shown nothing. Honest failure cost nothing. Being seen to try was the only thing that moved anyone.

People keep their side of the deal. They want the government to do the doable and will put up with the rest. They tolerate a sincere effort that fails. I watched that for 33 years.

What they do not forgive is narrower than we think, and it has three parts. No named person is doing the job. No one telling them how long it will take. And not doing what was plainly doable. Everything else they will carry with you.

What The Era Did To The Ground

Two revolutions have stretched the distance between the State's head and its hands, and neither was anyone's decision.

The first is movement. Men, money, goods and grievances now cross a district in an hour and a state in an afternoon. A consignment interdicted on the Punjab–Delhi corridor does not change what a dependent man in Sirsa takes tomorrow; the trade routes are around the seizure before it is weighed. The officer in charge of Sirsa holds the ground. The problem no longer lives on it.

The second is the screen. A woman in Hisar is defrauded. She reports it on a national portal. Her money has already crossed into another state. Only a bank can stop it in its own time. The Station House Officer — who is the government to her — holds a matter whose every lever is elsewhere. In 2022 Haryana recorded 66,784 cybercrime complaints and registered 681 cases. The rest had to be forwarded. That is not neglect. It is what a process looks like once it has outgrown the ground it stands on.

Then the transfer order finishes the work. I sat in 27 offices in 33 years; two lasted four years, and none of the rest beyond two. By the time a citizen has learnt his SDM's name, the SDM is learning the next district's.

Put the three together, and the officer in charge of a territory has become a messenger — even if sincere, only passing the citizen along to the portal, the bank, the other state, and the headquarters. The citizen meets a series of people, none of whom owns his problem, because the design has quietly decided that nobody does.

Restating The Ground

The era has not changed one thing. The citizen still has an address. The mother cannot forward her son.

So the answer to a borderless problem is not a borderless officer. It is the opposite: state, in writing, who is answerable for each piece of ground, and give that person the reach to act across borders from his ground rather than hollowing the ground out beneath him.

I did this once, in a small way, with the most borderless crime there is. When cybercrime arrived in Haryana, the instinct everywhere was to treat it as a special skill for a special unit somewhere else. Instead, we put a cyber desk in every police station and a nodal officer in every district, with a one-page procedure and short training. The crime stayed borderless. The accountability became local: a named person at the thana to receive the complaint, start the clock, and work the 1930 helpline for the victim. Those desks outlived my tenure because they gave the citizen a face at his own address for a problem that had none.

A lady constable completed the design with short videos on her own phone, in her own Haryanvi, on what the newest fraud looked like and why to call 1930 within the hour without shame. Reporting rose, and with it the money frozen before it vanished — from 8.62 per cent of the amount defrauded in September 2023 to 38 per cent by the following year. Her territory was the phone in her hand.

Enforcing It

Stating territorial accountability is a page. Enforcing it is four decisions, answering the citizen's three complaints — a name, a time, the doable — and the truth about all three.

Name the ground. For every problem the State has promised to address — drugs, fraud, a pension, a road — publish who is answerable for it in each district and block, by designation, with the date they took charge. Not a committee. A name.

Give the name of the tenure. Two years is the Supreme Court's figure and the right one. An officer who will be gone in 10 months is a messenger by arithmetic, however good he is.

Measure the doable by territory. Not meetings held or people sensitised, but the number that tells the citizen whether his ground improved and how long it took: complaints converted, patients retained, days to a certificate, days to compensation. Published by the district every quarter, so the time it will take is a figure and not a shrug.

Tell the people from the ground. The struggle and the result, however small, in their language, from the officer who did the work. People trust government more when they see the streetlight fixed and no less when they see the ones still dark. What they cannot forgive is a job with no name on it.

The Address

The problem will keep moving; no strategy room will stop it. The citizen does not move, and that is the one fixed point the state can build on.

I do not know what happened to the mother. I know what she will do if somebody comes — not with a solution, only with a sincere effort and the truth about its limits. She will put up with it if it fails. She will be grateful if it is large. And if she can see it is real, she will join it and bring the lane with her.

People keep their side of the deal. In 33 years I never saw them fail. The ground still exists. The only question is whether the State has written a name on it.

About the Author: O. P. Singh is the CEO-designate of SANKALP, Haryana’s anti-drug society, and a former Director General of Police, Haryana. A distinguished IPS officer (1992–2025) with extensive experience in law enforcement, his work focuses on narcotics control, public safety, law enforcement administration, and community-driven substance abuse prevention.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the publisher. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information, the publisher is not responsible for any errors or omissions, or for the results obtained from the use of this information.