Acknowledgements

The Status of Policing in India Report (SPIR) 2020-2021 builds on the foundation laid by Common Cause leadership since the nineties. We owe special gratitude to the organisation’s founder Director Mr H D Shourie and all members of its Governing Council, past and present, particularly Mr Vikram Lal, Mr Kamal Kant Jaswal, Mr Prakash Singh and Dr B P Mathur, who, from time to time, provided their valuable guidance for the police reforms programme.

The SPIR series of reports would not have been possible without the commitment of our philanthropic partners – the Tata Trusts and the Lal Family Foundation. We owe very special gratitude towards them for believing in the project’s philosophy, of creating baseline literature on policing in India to help policymakers come to rational, factbased conclusions.

The study gained a lot from the ideas and insights provided by Dr Ish Kumar, IPS and former Director of the National Crime Records Bureau, and Mr Vibhuti Narain, IPS and former DGP of Uttar Pradesh. Our special gratitude also extends to the Director of CSDS, Prof Awadhendra Sharan, and the faculty members, especially Profs Abhay Kumar Dubey, Sanjeer Alam and Ravi Sundaram, for their valuable inputs for the study. Our sincere thanks to Profs Ashis Nandy and Rajeev Bhargava for their continued support for the SPIR series of studies from the very beginning.

Our special acknowledgement to the insights provided by the members of the team working on the India Justice Report, particularly Mr Harish Narasappa of Daksha, Bangalore, Professor Vijay Raghavan of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, Mr Gagan Sethi of the Centre for Social Justice, Ahmedabad, Mr Sanjoy Hazarika and Ms Maja Daruwala of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), Mr Arghya Sengupta of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, and Ms Shireen Vakeel, Ms Niyati Singh and Mr Valay Singh of the Tata Trusts’ team in Delhi.

Getting permissions for interviewing police personnel was tough; our special thanks to the Indian Police Foundation (IPF) for providing letters endorsing the study, which helped a great deal in data collection. The IPF Chairman Mr Prakash Singh and President Mr N. Ramachandran deserve a special mention for their timely support, particularly in the middle of the national lockdown. This study could not have been possible without meticulous teamwork of state coordinators, state supervisors, field investigators, the data screening and the data entry teams, researchers and data analysts at Common Cause, Lokniti-CSDS, and their collaborators at a number of universities and institutions all across India who conducted training workshops, helped in sampling, and supervised pilot trials. The hard work undertaken by the teams to conduct face-to-face interviews during the global pandemic, while ensuring that safety protocols are being adhered to, also needs a special mention.

We appreciate the contributions made by our partners in the field towards the rapid study, ‘Police Response to the Pandemic: A Rapid Study of Migrant and Aid Workers’, summarised in Chapter 7 of the report. We are particularly thankful to Aheli Chowdhury (Director, JOSH), Elizabeth Devi (Founding Member, Community of Social Change and Development), Gagan Sethi (Founder, Janvikas and Centre for Social Justice), Kavita Srivastava (People’s Union for Civil Liberties - PUCL) with her colleague Rashid Hussain, Mukesh (Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan - MKSS), Munna Prasad (Inqalabi Mazdoor Kendra, Faridabad). Rajiv Khandelwal (Founder and Director, Aajeevika Bureau) and his colleagues Santosh and Anhad, and Sandeep Sachdeva (Co-founder and CEO, Safe in India Foundation) with his colleague Masab.

Lastly, a special acknowledgement is due to thousands of common people for their participation in the survey across the most-affected cities. Our special gratitude is also owed to all the police personnel without whose cooperation and willingness to share their opinions and perceptions, this study would not have materialised. We are also deeply grateful to the migrant workers and the aid workers who agreed to participate in the rapid study.

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