SC directs 21 states and UTs about Police Recruitment

New Delhi, Aug 22: The division bench Supreme Court has directed 21 states and union territories (UTs) to file affidavits within four weeks explaining the mechanism and the time-frame within which they would fill up vacancies in the police force.

A bench comprising Chief Justice J S Khehar and Justice D Y Chandrachud has so far ordered 14 states, including Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Karnataka, to fill up almost 4.3 lakh vacancies in the states' police force in a time-bound manner.

"The remaining states and UTs shall file affidavits within four weeks indicating the manner of filling up of vacancies in the police department," the bench said.

The apex court was hearing a 2013 petition filed by advocate Manish Kumar claiming that the law and order situation in the country was deteriorating due to a large number of vacancies in police services at all levels across all states.

The court is now monitoring the filling up of the vacancies in each state and has asked the state governments to submit their roadmaps.

Today, hill state Uttarakhand submitted its roadmap for filling up the vacancies in the police, which was taken on record by the court.

Earlier, the top court had accepted the roadmap given by the Gujarat government and directed it to complete the recruitment process by August 31 next year.

It had directed the home secretaries of three states Haryana with 15,163 police vacancies, Madhya Pradesh (14,729) and Chhattisgarh (12,638) to submit their roadmaps.

It had also accepted the road map of Telangana which has 17,504 police vacancies across all ranks. The state said the process of filling up of posts was on and 9,862 vacancies will be filled up by September 1 this year.

For the remaining batch of 7642 vacant posts, the state government had informed the court that the recruitment process will end by March 31, 2019.

Besides Gujarat and Telangana, it has so far accepted the road maps of Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Jharkhand and West Bengal.It has rejected the one submitted by Bihar government and has summoned its top officials with the revised proposal tomorrow.