Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) -- India’s 1 million police work in “abysmal conditions” and rely on torture in a corrupt system created by British colonial rulers that undermines law and security, according to the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

“While India rightly touts itself as an emerging economic powerhouse that is also the world’s largest democracy, its police” forces are “widely regarded within India as lawless, abusive and ineffective,” the New York-based group said in a 118-page report released today.

Senior police officers “are condoning and ordering the illegal arrest, torture and even killing of suspects,” said Naureen Shah, a U.S. lawyer and researcher who wrote the report. Officers kill suspects in “false encounters,” reporting the deaths as the result of spontaneous gun battles, Shah said.

“Police are overworked and demoralized and feel they have no other way of doing the work,” Shah said in an interview.

India’s Home Ministry, which supervises police affairs, will comment on the report “in due course, after it has been reviewed,” said Ravinder Singh, a ministry press officer.

Similar issues face Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, according to a study by the New Delhi-based Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. Each country’s police force was founded by the British Empire “to subjugate very large and hostile indigenous populations,” and the “governments have largely retained this colonial structure” to better keep power, according to a study set to be released formally on Aug. 12.

Popular Trust

With India, Pakistan and Bangladesh facing ethnic insurgencies, violent Islamic militants or both, there can be no effective counter-insurgency “without a police force that people trust,” said Sanjay Patil, author of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative report.

While international donors and domestic civil liberties groups push changes to make police more independent and professional, “reform efforts have been stymied by local government administrators and political parties, who use the police to enhance their own power and are reluctant to give up that control,” Patil said in a phone interview.

India is short of police, deploying an officer for every 1,037 residents, compared with a global average of one per 333 citizens, said the Human Rights Watch report. Ill-trained officers typically are on call 24 hours, sleeping in dormitories short of beds or toilets, it said, citing interviews with 80 police and scores of other people over a year. They often work without vehicles and armed with World War I-era guns, it said.

Personal Servants

Low-ranking officers routinely are assigned as personal servants to seniors. As many as a quarter of officers in the capital, New Delhi, have been assigned this year as escorts to politicians, business or entertainment figures, the report said.

About 90 percent of India’s police are low-ranking constables who “get practically no training other than physical exercises and polishing of boots,” said Shah. “They are not even trained or authorized to secure a crime scene.”

“Violent abuse is the main investigating tactic” and criminal cases “are based almost completely on confessions,” Shah said. Physical evidence is often tampered with or accidentally contaminated, and then dismissed by judges.

About 90 percent of India’s criminal trials result in acquittal, Vice President Hamid Ansari said in an April speech.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose government won re- election in May, has promised broad reforms, but India’s police are controlled mainly by the country’s 28 states and seven territorial governments.

British-Era Laws

India governs law enforcement under the Police Act of 1861 introduced by British colonial rulers. Since 1979, four Indian government commissions have recommended new laws, and the Supreme Court in 2006 ordered that independent commissions, rather than politicians, appoint and promote police.

Public pressure and the Supreme Court order have brought “a few changes over the years, but they have been piecemeal, ad hoc and inadequate,” said B.G. Verghese, chairman of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.

To contact the reporter on this story: James Rupert in New Delhi at jrupert3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: August 4, 2009 05:30 EDT