The MHA maintains that it is the primary responsibility of State Governments to prevent police atrocities and ensure human rights of the people as Police and Public Order are State Subjects in the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution of India. However, the Government of India issues advisories to the States and Union Territories on prevention of human rights violation. Added to this, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) issues guidelines and procedure to be followed in cases of death in police action, from time to time.
In keeping with the guidelines by the NHRC, every death in police or judicial custody is reported mandatorily within 24 hours of occurrence. The NHRC also calls for various reports, such as, inquest, post-mortem, magisterial inquiry, viscera reports and so on, to ascertain foul-play, if any, by police for every death in police or judicial custody.

The NHRC has also been sensitizing senior police personnel and state officials on a regular basis for better protection of human rights. But of little or no use. Police all over the nation continues to be brutish, short, nasty, and atrocious and at that the most corrupt of the state organ. Nothing fruitful has been done to bring reforms in police apparatus notwithstanding various reformative reports of Justice Malimath Committee, Law Commission of India and the Supreme Court orders in Prakash Singh case. Among other measures on police reforms, the most important is separation of investigation from police and creating separate investigation agency, independent of police, to minimize corruption and end brutality and atrocity by police as such in order to ensure human rights of the people, who are the sovereign masters of the Government of the transient majority in our system of the rule of law based democratic governance.

The NHRC, set up under the National Human Rights Act, 1993, recommends monetary relief to the next of kin of victims in the proven cases of custodial deaths and disciplinary action against the guilty police. According to the official information, the NHRC has recommended monetary relief of Rs.6, 33,44,999 for victims of custodial deaths and disciplinary action against police personnel in 33 cases of deaths in police custody. The lesser monetary relief and fewer action against police misconduct is because of flawed system of investigation continuing with the police and collusive culture in public services including police to protect each other, besides NHRC’s dependence on police for investigation. Unless systematic reforms are made, malpractices, corruption and deviant behaviour of public servants including police will continue to be unabated.

Country’s poor records of human rights is also alluded to the failure of the successive Governments of India to ratify the United Nations Convention Against Torture, adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1984, to which India is a signatory. If the UN Convention is ratified by India, the two draconian provisions of Section 330 and Section 331 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, which confer on police unrestricted power to torture, would have been reconciled to the UN Convention Against Torture or abrogated altogether to contain police atrocities in custody. This speaks volume of the signal failure of the NHRC to mount pressure on the Government for the needful for better protection of human rights of citizens of India in keeping with the Constitutional postulates!

After all, all national level standing commissions, such as the National Commission for Backward Classes, National Commission for Scheduled Castes, National Commission for Scheduled Tribes, National Commission for Women and National Commission for Minorities are represented on the board of the NHRC, which is headed by a retired Chief Justice of India, to work collectively for the protection of human rights and over all socio-economic welfare of the people of India!