Less than a month after the terror attack on popular German Bakery in Pune, the government on Wednesday admitted that shortage of manpower had made it difficult to safeguard "all public places" in the country.
Although the shortage of manpower is a country-wide phenomenon, Maharashtra, which witnessed the latest terror attack despite having intelligence alert, presented a dismal picture with the highest number of police vacancies (49,252) in the country.
Stating that suspected main targets in Pune were put under police protection, minister of state for home affairs Ajay Maken said, "However, due to obvious limitations of manpower, it was not possible to bring all public places under security cover."
In his written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha, he while referring to the German Bakery incident said: "The terrorists succeeded in attacking a soft target". The minister also mentioned that the incident took place there despite having intelligence inputs. He said: "There were intelligence inputs to indicate that certain places in Pune and some other cities in India were on the target list of terrorist outfits. Accordingly, on October 9 last year as a preventive step, the State Police had issued detailed security guidelines to major commercial establishments including the German Bakery".
Though the government had, time and again, stated about shortage of manpower while referring to existing vacancies of over 2.67 lakh of police personnel across the country, the admission of difficulties in bringing all public places under police security highlights a different aspect of the problem.
It also raises questions on the necessity of sparing nearly one lakh police personnel across the country for security to VVIPs at the cost of security to common people/public places.
Of late, the home ministry has streamlined the security cover of VIPs by weeding out some protectees — having no threats — from the list of protected persons. But similar exercises have not been done in states for years, forcing a significant chunk of cops to be deployed for protecting a number of VIPs who avail such cover as a mere status symbol.
The situation of manpower shortage has become so critical over the years that the country has merely 129 cops per one lakh of population as against the United Nations norm of 220 police personnel per one lakh of population.
