TN police slip in ranking, from 1st in 2019 to 5th in 2020

Though Tamil Nadu has ranked second in the country in the overall delivery of justice after Maharashtra, according to the second edition of India Justice Report, an initiative by the Tata Trust, the TN police has slipped in ranking of state police from being first in 2019 to the fifth place in 2020. In prisons rankings though, TN has improved its position from tenth to sixth.

In police ratings, Karnataka topped with a score of 5.71 out of 10, closely followed by Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. TN police scored 5.40 out of 10, slipping to the fifth position. This ranking is based on several indicators such as structural availability of resources, staff, diversity, budget allocation, usage and so on. While at the national level, around Rs 8000 is spent on training each police personnel on an average, the state expenditure in training its police personnel remains an abysmal Rs 2, IJR states. To put this in perspective, while Mizoram spends over Rs 32,000, Delhi spends nearly Rs 25,000 to train each police personnel. According to the report, as on January 2020, TN police had 9.4 per cent positions vacant.

In terms of gender parity, there are 18.5 percent of women among constabulary while among officers, at least 24.8 percent of the staff are women.

Among prisons, though the TN prisons have moved up in the ranking, only 9 per cent of prisons in the state have video conferencing facility for remand hearing. As per the report, TN spends Rs 41,000 per inmate per year, while neighbouring AP spends Rs 2 lakh per prisoner.

Among the ranking of states for the status of respective judiciary, TN retained top ranking like the previous year while in legal aid, Maharashtra topped the states in the list while TN is at 11th position.