Arrested development: States are hardly spending on modernising police

They allot little money from their own budgets and underutilise the money the centre gives them

State police forces used just 6 per cent of the Rs 620 crore the central government allotted them for modernisation in Financial Year 2022-23 (FY23), data shows.

It is not that the states are making up for the shortfall in utilisation of the central funds with their own finances. Data shows that the money the states spend from their budgets on the police is abysmal.

Compared to the states, the seven Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) of the federal government get enough money for modernisation (Table 1). The budget for CAPF – the Central Reserve Police Force, the Central Industrial Security Force, and the National Security Guard among them – in FY24 increased 7 per cent over the revised estimates for FY23. Between FY14 and FY24, the expenditure on them has increased at an average annual rate of 11 per cent. That is about twice more than the cumulative state budgets for their police forces. (Table 3)

Spending on law and order is not glamorous. It is difficult for a state chief minister to draw attention to the pace of development work by citing the money spent on the police. Yet as India becomes more urban, a well-functioning police will be needed to give citizens confidence about their security. This is particularly true of women in the lower income group, who need to feel safe before they step out of their homes for jobs.

Data from the Comptroller and Auditor General shows that poor spending on the police is endemic in states. The auditor has flagged these savings for most states over a span of five years, which means the problem does not have easy solutions.

As law and order is a state subject as per the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution, it means the bulk of spending on the police has to come from state resources.

States' underspending gets worse if they don’t use the Centre’s financial support adequately, as Table 2 shows. The Union Home Ministry said in a note: "Releases to States have varied vis-à-vis allocations. Where release is less than allocation, the same is on account of non-submission of Utilization Certificates(UCs) and where release exceeds allocation, the same is on account of releases made for Mega City Policing or/and supplementary releases or/and better performance incentives or/and incentives for police reforms".

There is no single reason to pinpoint why the spending on police has lagged. States since FY19 have not spent the entire money the centre gave them for police moderniastion, but they were close to the budget estimates. The divergence became sharp in pandemic-affected FY21, when less than 20 per cent of the sum meant for the modernisation could be utilised. Three years later, poor utilisation persists. In FY23, 21 of India’s 28 states have used less than Rs one crore each for modernising the police.

The implications are clear. The states are depending more and more for law and order issues on the well-developed CAPF, effectively surrendering quite a bit of their federal rights.