In February 2010, the then secretary of home affairs GK Pillai said in a media interview that manpower shortage was one of the biggest issues plaguing the police in the country, reeling off required and actual figures. The argument comes in handy every time the country witnesses a terrrorist strike, and is again doing the rounds after Wednesday?s serial blasts in Mumbai.

But FE has figures that give the lie to the argument, at least for the cities of Delhi and Mumbai, which have been high on the hit list.

A source in the ministry of home affairs told FE that Delhi and Mumbai now have a police-population (number of policemen per 100,000 population) ratio of close to 400?comparable to prominent cities of the developed world. The number of police stations in Delhi has gone up from 110 to 150 in the past couple of years, and 30,000 more personnel have been given to the Delhi Police.

The figure for Delhi is corroborated by the latest available data on the Bureau of Police Research and Development website, which states that Delhi has 390.5 policemen per 100,000 population. The source at MHA confirmed that the ratio for Mumbai is similar.

The US has an average police-population ratio of 230 policemen for 1,00,000 population, which increases substantially for larger American cities, as per U S Department of Justice statistics. However, when one talks of national figures, low manpower becomes an acute reality, with only around 160 policemen per 1,00,000 population as per the latest data, say MHA sources.

On January 1, 2009, the number stood even lower at 134.3 policemen per one lakh of population, as per BPRD data. The minimum United nations norm is 220. BPRD numbers put the actual police strength in India at over 30% short of the sanctioned strength of approximately 20.5 lakh policemen, at 15.5 lakh cops.

In 2009, it was agreed among the states and the Centre at a chief minsters’ conference that the number of constables in a police station should be a minimum of 40 for rural areas and 70 for urban areas. However, most states are nowhere near that number. If Delhi has 150 constables per police station, in Orissa it’s as low as 14 constables per police station. Sources add that the internal intelligence apparatus, predominantly the Intelligence Bureau (IB), has around 60,000 personnel?a far cry from the US, which has four times the number of intelligence personnel on a per capita basis as compared to India.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of Delhi-based think-tank Centre for Policy Research, says the manpower crisis in such key areas is worrying. ?Not only is it a huge quantitative problem, it’s a qualitative problem as well. If after a terrorist attack in Mumbai, you have to rush NSG and forensic teams from Delhi, then it’s reflective of our shortcomings. A modern state requires a vast and complex human resource machinery to run the necessary processes of governance and the country properly. And we fall short on that account,? he says.

The manpower challenge extends to the judiciary and health sector too. India has 14,576 judges against a sanctioned strength of 17,641, including 630 high court judges. This comes out to 10.5 judges per million people, which is even lower than the ratio in Bangladesh, which stands at 12, while it stands at an impressive 51 for UK and 110 for the US. Last year, Justice VV Rao of the Andhra Pradesh High Court stated that it would take the country’s judicial system 320 years to clear the backlog of 31.28 million cases pending in various courts.

As for the health sector, India has just one doctor for 1,700 people, while the global ratio stands at 1.5:1,000. The difference in ratios assumes epic proportions given India’s huge population, social demographics and widespread poverty. In other more developed countries, the ratio speaks for itself?Singapore at 1:714, Japan at 1:606, UK at 1:469, US at 1:350 and Germany at 1:296.