This Independence Day the country will count what it has built. Highways, satellites, and a space programme run on a modest budget, a seat at every high table.
It will not count the one achievement on which all the others stand, for a simple reason: we have never built an instrument to count it.
Consider an ordinary Tuesday. A billion and a half people leave their homes and converge—on trains pressed past capacity, on roads that obey no manual, into markets and offices and queues.
Assume, conservatively, that each has five consequential dealings with another human being in the course of the day: a wage paid, a fare argued, a stranger jostled in a lane, and a neighbour disagreed over a wall. That is seven billion points of possible friction, every day, in one country.
The Math of Daily Order
Crime, stripped of its vocabulary, is human dealing gone horribly wrong. So how often does it go wrong?
In 2023, the most recent year on its books, the National Crime Records Bureau recorded 62.4 lakh cognisable crimes across India—one every five seconds, about seventeen thousand a day. Set seventeen thousand against seven billion.
The arithmetic produces a figure this country has never been told: about two ten-thousandths of one per cent. Count only crimes against person and property, and it falls further still.
"The arithmetic produces a figure this country has never been told: about two ten-thousandths of one per cent."
I know every objection to that number, and the first one is right. Indians under-report crime and under-report some crimes catastrophically—those inside the home, those against women, and those that carry shame. The true volume of harm always runs ahead of the register.
But correct the figure generously, multiply it several times over, and the proportion stays astonishingly, almost suspiciously, low. The overwhelming majority of dealings between strangers in this country end, every day, in nothing at all. People cooperate. They queue, more or less. They give directions to people they will never see again.
Norms, Arithmetic, and Alternatives
This is not, in the first place, a fact about the police. It is a fact about a civilisation. But the police are among the institutions that keep it true, and here the story turns uncomfortable.
India is among the most thinly policed of the major nations. Roughly 153 officers are sanctioned for every lakh of citizens, and nearly six lakh of those posts stand empty—a vacancy of about twenty-two per cent, sustained for over a decade.
A large share of the officers actually present are tied up guarding installations and dignitaries rather than walking among the public. On any street, at any moment, the police are outnumbered by the police by a margin so vast that compliance plainly cannot be coming from their presence.
And it is not. The order we take for granted is overwhelmingly self-enforced. The constable is its backstop, not its source.
"The order we take for granted is overwhelmingly self-enforced. The constable is its backstop, not its source."
What holds it, then? Watch a farmer discover that his neighbour's plough has taken a foot and a half of his field—the commonest spark of rural violence—and notice what stays his hand. Three things, none of them a policeman:
An absorbed norm: One does not knife a neighbour over soil.
Rough arithmetic: A blow means a case, a lawyer he cannot afford, and a harvest left untended.
A lawful alternative: A Patwari to petition, a panchayat to convene, a complaint to file. Imperfect and slow, but real, so that he is not trapped between violence and surrender.
The work of the state is less to replace these three than to keep all three upright—and above all to be the lawful alternative that actually works on the morning a citizen, having done everything right, finally reaches the counter.
A 19th-Century Machine in a Hyper-Connected India
That compact has held for a long time. But it held on to foundations that are now shifting all at once.
For most of the Republic's life the country the police worked in was settled, slow, intensely local, and broadly deferential. Trouble travelled at the speed of a person; a rumour took a day to cross a district, and the officer usually heard it before the crowd did. The people a constable policed were people he knew.
Every one of those four assumptions has been withdrawn. India is urbanising at a pace no nineteenth-century city ever faced. A forwarded message reaches a district in an instant. The fraud that empties a pensioner's account in Kerala is dialled from another state on a SIM issued in a third.
And the citizen has changed most of all: younger, more literate, conscious of her rights, and carrying in her pocket the means to record, broadcast and mobilise. The machine that must meet her was designed in 1861 to control a subject population on behalf of a distant power.
Measuring What Matters
Here is what I would ask of Independence Day. Not a slogan, and not more force. A number.
We manage what we measure, and we measure the wrong thing. The state counts crimes—that is, it counts its own failures, the cases where order broke—and treats the vast, silent success as unremarkable background. For the good itself, it has almost no instrument at all.
England and Wales have run a national survey since the early 1980s that asks tens of thousands of citizens directly what was done to them and how safe they feel. The United States runs a comparable one. India counts crimes diligently, and the citizen's experience of order is not at all.
A standing, independently conducted, publicly reported measure of safety and of trust in the police—broken down by place, by gender, and by community—would do for internal security what national accounts once did for economic policy. It would make the invisible visible and the unmanaged manageable. Call it the National Safety Index on the letterhead; in plain speech, the order account—the Republic's second ledger, kept beside the register of crimes and given equal weight.
And it must be met at the doorstep, not on a screen. The Indians easiest to reach online are precisely the ones such an account least needs to hear. We already know how: our health surveys ask harder questions—about violence inside the home—in six lakh households.
Because the quiet fact of the ordinary day is not a reason for complacency. It is an inheritance, and a thin one. It has been held so far by the restraint of a billion strangers, underwritten by an institution too small to enforce it and too old to have been designed for the country it now serves.
What is not counted goes unattended. The order has gone uncounted for too long.
(The article draws from O. P. Singh’s forthcoming book ‘The Audacity of Order’)
About the Author: O.P. Singh is a retired Indian Police Service (IPS) officer and former Director General of Police, Haryana, who has held several senior positions in the state government and police administration.
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.
