UP100: Not a 100/100 Solution?

A lot has been said about the UP police in the last couple of days. What has not been talked about is the fact that it isn’t the lack of intervention to address the pressing problem of police inefficiency in the state that plays out each time, but sometimes it is also in the dilettantism of interventions that do not cater to all the factors contributing to the inefficiency. In all states of India, the emergency “100” is used to reach the police station by citizens in dire times. The mechanism is decentralised to ensure that the district and police station involved in the concerned case according to the geography are the responders to it. However, the UP government ascertained that managing a large state with limited resources have compromised the functionality of the police force. To combat the lack of resources, which was deemed to be a primary reason of police inefficiency in the State, the initiative of UP100 was rolled out in 2016 by the then Chief Minister, Akhilesh Yadav.

So, how is UP100 different? Unlike its counterparts in other states, UP100 is a centralised emergency response system. Launched in partnership with Mahindra, the UP100 is an initiative where a centralised call centre was established in Lucknow and an all-women team of more than 700 communication officers were delegated the task of receiving distress calls. The officers are trained for two months to understand the situation and be an empathetic and calming presence on call to the complainant. All calls made within the State are directed to the call centre in Lucknow who takes the relevant details down and passes it on to the concerned police station. The idea was to reduce the response time, ensure that help reaches the citizens of the State within a window of 15 minutes in urban areas and a window of 20 minutes in rural areas. It was to streamline the process of taking information and pass it on to the stations and monitoring the progress of the concerned police station till the issue is resolved. The intervention would have resolved trade-offs that local police stations have to make to cater to all their responsibilities with resources which are far below adequate.

Every day, the call centre logs 1,20,000 distress calls. Since the launch of the intervention to January 2019, UP 100 has responded to 10,495,159 calls, of which 60 per cent came from rural areas. During that time, approximately 1,200 suicides were averted by the police by timely intervention. The data seems very pleasing with the number of calls logged each day but can we truly measure efficiency by the number of calls received per day? It is sure a fantastic start but the end product is still ambiguous, which is by what per cent has the law and order of the State improved since the intervention came into existence?

A media report sheds light to the heated debate triggered in the wake of Uttar Pradesh government’s claim of crime rates seeing a decline in the State in the last three years. A recent report released in 2019 by NCRB states that the state sees a rape every two hours, as per police reports while crime against a child is reported every 90 minutes in Uttar Pradesh.

* Refers to data that wasn’t collected
Source: Crime in India 2019, NCRB 

According to NCRB’s recent reports, there has been a 7% increase in crimes against women post-2016. Instead of seeing a reducing trend, the table shows an upward trend for crimes against women in the aftermath of the intervention. A worthy question to ask is, is it truly enough to stick to anecdotes from the initial days or the number of calls logged per day when the data points otherwise?

The intervention brings structural reforms which do aid in bringing efficiency in the system. However, the structures can only hold when there are enough officers to implement them on the ground. Let’s assume that a communications officer receives a complain and forwards the details to the concerned police station, what happens when there is no one available to reach the complainant? A report reveals that there are only 65-123 policemen available for every 1,00,000 citizens in Uttar Pradesh, which makes the entire State’s police force one of the weakest in the country. While UP100 is a good approach in maximising benefit with the minimum available resources, it is important to remember that with a highly understaffed force formulation of intervention is far easier than the implementation of the same. There is a robust structure in place for collecting and disseminating information, but also requires enough policemen who can act on the information.

There has been a lot of debate over the inefficiency and the lack of ethical decision-making seen by the UP Police in the recent past. The discourse was long due and does bring light to the failing faith of citizens in the State’s Police Force. However, accusations and criticism without addressing the root causes of the problem only makes it a continuous topic for blood-boiling debates on the national television, akin to many other issues which often feature to only spark a thread of hate and trolling in the online world before dying out for another sensational content to make way.

We see the UP police’s inability to do their job but that’s merely a symptom, what is the cause for this symptom? The lack of manpower in the force has been a long-standing problem. According to research done by PRS Legislative, only 3.4% of the state budget is utilised for the police force in Uttar Pradesh. It is far below ideal but there has been a consistent increase of 15% on an average in the budget annually over time. It isn’t just the dearth of budget but also the abysmal utilisation of funds towards the purpose they are allocated for. In 2015-16, only 14% of funds available were utilised by the State for police force. The understaffed stations, therefore, are often low on both incentive and the ability to work in a manner that is expected. Instead, there is incentive coming from the wrong places to slow down investigations, or to not react altogether. Considering, human beings are driven by self-interest usually, the pay-offs are higher for the policemen to not do their job.

Apart from structural barriers, the ministers in each state are supposed to monitor and ensure accountability of the force towards citizens. However, the unmonitored nature of the superintendence has led to power being exerted over the police force to satisfy personal and political conditions of political figures. The caste-based politics in Uttar Pradesh and the desire to remain in power often drives leaders to keep their supporters satisfied for the next term, not through their work but by their continuous bias against particular sections of the society. Uttar Pradesh often sees Upper Caste unleashing violence on Dalits and walking away scot-free, the credit goes the nuanced structure of vote-bank politics. A combination of institutional loopholes and a festering infection of casteism that is often capitalised by parties for political purposes plague the efficiency of the police force in the State.

UP100 was allocated a budget of Rs. 2325 crores over five years. It is a substantial percentage of the budget for the police force. The initiative is applaud-worthy for being a step in the right direction and an intervention worth investing the political capital of the then ruling party on it. However, to treat UP100 as a panacea to all problems with the UP police force without supportive policies which are aligned with it to bring forward police reforms is why the intervention fails to reach the outcomes that were predicted during its inception.

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