Senior police officials use low-ranking staff as orderlies: HRW

Senior police officials in India frequently use low-ranking staff as their "orderlies" and even "personal family servants", an international human rights organisation has alleged in its latest report.

The US-based Human Rights Watch claimed that the police structure in India was based on a colonial law that did not provide the lower ranks, usually local recruits, with operational authority or advanced professional training.

"Inexplicably, that system continues six decades after the end of British rule in India," it added. Constables, the bottom rank, make up as much as 85% of the Indian police, but for the most part they are not trained to investigate crime complaints, it said.

"Junior and low-ranking police are frequently demoralised due to degrading working and living conditions," the rights body claimed on the basis of interviews of low ranking policemen it conducted in the country.

"Many low-ranking police officers live in barracks that are deteriorating, cramped, and without enough beds," it alleged. Junior-ranking police officers have little chance of promotion and are subject to the "unrealistic" demands of senior officers, who are for the most part directly recruited into management positions and often have "no first hand knowledge of the difficulties the lower ranks face", it added.