EVERY summer across north India, millions of Hindu youths honour Lord Shiva by travelling to the sacred Ganges to collect holy water for anointing the Shiva lingams in their local temples. The pilgrims travel on foot and use a wooden yoke or kanvar to balance two small buckets. But though the sight of orange-clad kanvarias on country roads is picturesque, the scene Indians may remember best from this year’s Kanvar Yatra took place in the crowded heart of Delhi, India’s capital.

Mobile-phone footage captured a gang of kanvarias smashing a small passenger car to pieces and then tipping it over. Yet it was not this sudden fury—provoked, apparently, by the driver causing one man to spill some water—that shocked Indians. What rankled most was seeing two armed, crisply uniformed police officers wander into the melee and watch, making no effort to stop the methodical demolition of some poor citizen’s property on a busy street.

India’s 1.9m policemen do not, by and large, enjoy a good reputation. It is easy to understand why. A simple glance at recent news clips substantiates a range of complaints. Are police corrupt? Consider that public rage over extortion by traffic police has prompted the state of Uttarakhand to forbid its finest to carry more than 200 rupees ($2.85) in cash. Brutal? A high court has just ordered an independent investigation into the killing by police gunfire, including from sniper rifles, of 13 people at a peaceful protest against the pollution caused by a copper smelter. Ineffective? In recent incidents of mob lynching that have shocked India, perpetrators have repeatedly explained that they had to take the law into their own murderous hands because the police were absent or unreliable. Callous and incompetent? When a seven-year-old boy was murdered in the bathroom of a private school last year, police in a Delhi suburb forced the lower-caste conductor of a school bus to confess and closed the case. Weeks later a court-ordered reinvestigation used previously ignored CCTV footage to reveal that the killer had been an older student.

Are police in the pockets of powerful politicians? Consider that Delhi police answer not to the city government but to the home ministry, run by the rival Bharatiya Janata Party of the prime minister, Narendra Modi. The city’s ruling party is Aam Aadmi. Since winning Delhi’s election in 2015 it has complained of continuous petty harassment. Among other things, police raided one official’s home and then charged him for possessing a bit more alcohol than is permitted by the arcane Delhi Excise Act. Courts have thrown out 19 out of 22 cases filed by Delhi police against Aam Aadmi’s senior members.

But while lurid press coverage makes it easy to spot police shortcomings, it does less to explain them. Talk to policemen themselves and the reasons for poor performance become clear. There are, to start with, too few of them. Excluding paramilitary forces and riot squads—and including only those in active service rather than the number that governments, for budget purposes, claim are working—India’s ratio of ordinary policemen per 1,000 people is just 1.2, about half the level recommended by the UN. By the government’s own reckoning, the country has 600,000 too few of them. Contrary to impressions of laziness, Indian police tend to be overworked. A national survey in 2014 found that 90% of officers worked longer than eight hours a day, and 73% got no more than one day off per week. Researchers say the recent introduction of eight-hour shifts in the state of Kerala and for city police in Mumbai has radically improved morale.

Police also spend much energy doing things other than fighting crime. Akshay Mangla of Oxford University reckons that in the state of Madhya Pradesh, election duties alone take up between a sixth and an eighth of all police time. This does not just mean providing security to campaign rallies, or protecting ballot boxes in endless rounds of polls. Rules intended to prevent corruption or political bias require that as many as half the higher-ranking officers in the state must be transferred to a new district before every major election.

The administrative structure of the force has changed little since the British Raj. Some two-thirds of police are lowly constables, typically with little training, limited equipment and no powers to arrest or investigate. At the pinnacle stand the 5,000 members of the Indian Police Service, a national corps that before 1920 was staffed only by British officers. Selected via competitive exams, these elite officers rarely stay in a post more than two years, but enjoy housing, transport and other perks. Between them and the lowest-ranking policemen are officers in various state police forces who hold full responsibility for everyone junior but enjoy no influence over their pampered superiors. “Basically they have not invested in middle management,” says Mr Mangla.

One frustrating result is that police stations are often reluctant to issue First Information Reports (FIRs), the necessary beginning to most legal action in India. Mr Mangla explains that since the performance metric that gets reported upwards is the proportion of FIRs that a station investigates and closes, “there is every incentive to keep this denominator low.”

Complaints about India’s police are nothing new. Successive national commissions since the 1970s have urged a range of reforms, which have largely been ignored. A report in 2018 by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, an NGO, measured compliance by Indian states with six separate directives on police reform issued by India’s Supreme Court in 2006. Not a single state had fully complied. Small wonder many Indians have concluded that politicians are unwilling to reform the police, because the force serves the interests of politicians perfectly well. The police agree. One state’s police chief recently asked officers to rank their top three problems. In ascending order, they were poor communications inside the force, lack of manpower or resources—and meddling politicians.