India state capacity graphs of the day - police and judiciary

From a Livemint article examining the slow pace of India's criminal justice system comes this graphic about India's policemen to population ratio.

And this about judges to population ratio!

We are stuck in a really bad equilibrium with respect to government. We have the classic "starve the beast" at work. The intellectuals, opinion makers, and media have to share the major part of the blame for creating an environment where anything government has become stigmatised and any plans of expanding the "bloated" bureaucracy is scorned upon. Even government officials aware of the gravity of the state capacity challenge being faced have become captives of this ideological hegemony. 

Leave aside the likes of teachers and medical personnel, recruitments to important regulatory positions in the government (judges and policemen, building and food inspectors, drugs and school inspectors, and so on) have been either frozen or are being done very parsimoniously. This has coincided with a period of dramatic expansion of the scale and scope of responsibilities of these regulatory officials. The result has been to make an already overburdened bureaucracy even more so, and in turn appear even more inefficient. And this makes the demands for privatisation and outsourcing grow louder.

None of this is to suggest that we go ahead and hire people and things will be fine. It is not a good use of money to just hire people without more deep structural reforms of the bureaucratic system - process re-engineering, delegation of authority, right level of regulatory engagement, use of technology to make transactions more transparent and efficient, measures to contain politicisation etc.  But hiring more people should be right at the top of the agenda! There is just no need of being defensive about this!