Team of elite policemen notorious for killing criminals in shoot-outs in the 90s say rising crime means squad is needed

They were known as "the encounter squad", a team of elite policemen who left a trail of hundreds of dead criminals behind them. Heroes to the local media, notorious as extra-judicial killers to others, the 12 best-known among them became celebrities.

But when their brand of rough justice was no longer seen as useful or desirable, they underwent a spectacular fall from grace. Few if any were charged with murder, but most were suspended over allegations of corruption, and some left the force for good.

Now, with violent crime on the rise again in India's commercial capital, they are hoping for a comeback. Little other than his biceps and the .45 pistol in his jeans waistband distinguishes Daya Nayak from the other clients of a popular coffee bar in a wealthy suburb of north Mumbai. But Nayak was one of the best-known of the "encounter specialists", killing 83 people in an eight-year period.

In his first interview since being suspended on suspicion of corruption in 2006, Nayak told the Guardian that the men he shot were "all guilty criminals" who themselves had murdered many. He has now been cleared of all the charges against him and is looking forward to resuming his career.

"Now I am just waiting for them to decide what to do with me. I am keeping my old network alive. I am getting information. I am ready for when they need me again. I am waiting to bounce back," says Nayak.

Another veteran of the encounter squad is Sachin Waze, 39, who killed 63 people. "I don't think about it ever. Every one of them deserved to go and they went," he says. "In my blood I am a policeman. I didn't do it for money. It was for fame, recognition and to serve the public."

According to Waze, he and his colleagues were responsible for "cleaning up" Mumbai. "Before we started, there were 33 extortion attempts a day. You could not drive a Mercedes without getting a call. When it ended there were none. Now [police] are scared to draw their weapons and the level of extortion is going back up again and there are weekly shoot-outs," Waze adds.

The encounter squad was formed – with the tacit assent of local political and police authorities – in the late 1990s, when heavily armed gangsters threatened to turn Mumbai into a conflict zone.

One of the reasons for the squad's creation was the weakness of the criminal justice system. Slow, corrupt and ineffective, the creaking court process meant that securing convictions against organised criminals was virtually impossible. By contrast, the encounter squad offered an efficient – if bloody and controversial – solution: over a seven-year period, more than a thousand criminals died at the hands of the police. Critics said they were little more than extra-judicial killings.

Of the original "Mumbai's Dirty Harrys" as the press dubbed them, few have survived in service.

Inspector Pradeep Sharma – whose catchline to reporters was "criminals are filth and I'm the cleaner" – is fighting charges of murder and corruption. He logged 103 killings, boasting of being addicted to "encounters", before being suspended.

Another well-known member of the squad, Vijay Salaskar, was killed by Islamic militants in the November 2008 attack on luxury hotels and a range of other targets in Mumbai.

Three major Bollywood films have already been made about Nayak's rags to riches story and more are planned, but beyond the best-known names, dozens of other police officers have also been investigated for their part in the killings.

"They are almost all in bad circumstances," says Waze, who has since built up a successful security business. "Most just want to go back to doing what they do best: their jobs."

Now the police force is quietly allowing some of the encounter specialists to wear uniform once again. Waze, Nayak and the others cite the example of one former colleague, an officer with 90 killings to his name, who has now rejoined the 40,000-strong Mumbai police after a five-year suspension. Three other lower ranking policemen were readmitted with him. Another top "encounter specialist" refused to talk to the Guardian, as his suspension too has been lifted.

A press campaign is beginning to build up steam. Sympathetic journalists in the city's sensationalist and widely read tabloid newspapers have written that a new wave of gang leaders are taking the place of those who once terrorised the city.

Last summer saw a spate of killings by associates of major criminals, leading local crime reporters to compare the situation to 1998, when, after laws were passed banning the use of lethal force other than as a last resort, there were more than 100 shoot-outs.

Yet it may well be that the time of the encounter specialists has definitively passed. The chaos of the 1990s has given way to the marginally better-ordered economic boom of today.

Mumbai is the richest city in India and the idea of gunning down criminals on its streets, where expensive foreign cars now compete with rickshaws and overcrowded buses for space, seems almost unimaginable. "It was a totally wrong approach. They got information from one gang to kill their competitors. They were thugs in uniform," says Julio Ribeiro, a former Mumbai police commissioner.

"Mumbai has moved on. It is a different place. It's a very good thing that they have gone. They should stay gone."

A colonial style of policing

If India has modernised rapidly in some areas, policing remains largely unchanged since the days of British rule. Underpaid, undermanned and under-equipped, those charged with enforcing law and order in the seething cities and poverty-stricken countryside have a well-deserved reputation for corruption – on a small and grand scale – and systematic brutality.

No accountability, a lack of training, almost no capacity to conduct forensic analysis and a criminal justice system that is so slow that it can take years for a case to reach court have together encouraged policemen to rely on "confessions" to resolve investigations. Beatings with the lathi – a thick bamboo stave tipped with metal – are so common as to go unremarked by the media.

"A bit of lathi does no harm," said one retired policeman in Mumbai. By some estimates, around 800 prisoners die in custody in India each year. About four people died or were killed in police custody every day in India between 2002 and 2007, the Asian Centre for Human Rights said in a report.

Crowd control training and non-lethal equipment is rare, so officers routinely open fire on protestors – whether farmers demonstrating against the forced sale of their land or teenagers throwing stones in Kashmir. Lower ranking Indian policemen do not normally carry arms.

Significant political pressure to achieve results as well as poor living conditions, long hours and low salaries for policemen exacerbates the problem, a 2009 report by the campaign group Human Rights Watch claimed.

Many hundreds of policemen are killed or injured each year. Medical care is poor and support for families limited. Most police belong to state forces.

Many states have taken steps to improve conduct, conditions and crime-fighting tactics in recent years.