Need time to fill police vacancies due to polls: Guj to SC

Gujarat government today told the Supreme Court that due to assembly elections in the state later this year, it needed time till August 2018 to fill up over 11,000 vacancies in its police force.
A bench of Chief Justice J S Khehar accepted the roadmap given by the state government and directed it to complete the recruitment process by August 31, 2018.
The counsel, appearing for the state government, said the recruitment for 17,000 posts out of the 28,580 posts across various ranks was recently concluded and the appointment letters will be given by May 31.
To this, the bench asked the state home secretary to fill up the remaining 11,580 vacancies, including for 5,299 posts of constables, by May 31, 2018 through direct recruitment.

The counsel said due to the assembly election scheduled later this year, it will be difficult for them to complete the process by May 31, 2018 and three more months be given to them.
The bench, also comprising Justices D Y Chandrachud and S K Kaul, then fixed the deadline of August 31, 2018 for filling up of remaining vacancies in Gujarat and said that in case of any deviation from time schedule, the home secretary of the state shall be personally held responsible.

The apex court directed the home secretaries of three states -- Haryana with 15,163 police vacancies, Madhya Pradesh (14,729) and Chhattisgarh (12,638) -- to submit their roadmaps.

The apex court also accepted the roadmap of Telangana which has 17,504 police vacancies across all ranks. The state said the process of filling up of posts was on and 9,862 vacancies will be filled up by September 1 this year.
For the remaining batch of 7642 vacant posts, the state government informed the court that the recruitment process will end by March 31, 2019.
With regard to Rajasthan government, the apex court accepted its roadmap and directed that 20 per cent of the 15,701 vacancies across all ranks should be filled up this year, 30 per cent by March 31 next year and the remaining 50 per cent by March 31, 2019, failing which its home secretary would be held responsible.

The hearing remained inconclusive and will continue tomorrow.
The apex court was hearing a 2013 petition filed by advocate Manish Kumar which claimed that law and order situation in the country was deteriorating due to a large number of vacancies in police services at all levels across all states.
The court is now monitoring the filling up of the vacancies in each state and has asked the state governments to submit their roadmaps.
Besides Gujarat and Telangana, it has so far accepted the roadmaps of Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Jharkhand and West Bengal. It has rejected the one submitted by Bihar government and has summoned its top officials with the revised proposal tomorrow.

Yesterday, the apex court had accepted the roadmap given by the Jharkhand government for filling up vacancies of over 10,000 constables, 3017 sub-inspectors and 72 deputy superintendents of police and directed the state authorities to strictly adhere to the time-line.
Jharkhand government has contended that the total cadre strength of its constables was 52,943 and 36,636 constables are currently working and there were 16,307 vacancies. Of these, 6,148 vacancies have been abolished and as a result the total vacancies for constables now stood at 10,159.
The apex court had earlier pulled up the Bihar government for seeking two years time to appoint 174 stenographers in the police force and had rejected its roadmap to fill up the vacancies. It had asked the Nitish Kumar government to revise its roadmap and submit a fresh one.

The apex court had on April 24 directed the Uttar Pradesh government to fill over 1.5 lakh police vacancies in fours years, saying this will help in dealing with the law and order problem.
It had also directed the governments of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka to fill up about 45,000 such vacancies in a time- bound manner, while expressing dissatisfaction with the responses of West Bengal in the matter.
The petitioner had claimed that there were around 5.42 lakh vacancies in the police services in the country.