An IPS officer heading one of the most high-profile districts in Delhi was once shunted out because he personally made a hoax bomb call from his office landline to settle scores with an amusement park owner. Around the same time, another senior Delhi Police officer was taken to task as he managed to get so drunk one evening, he ended up abusing the police commissioner on his wireless set - with the entire top brass listening in to this unexpected Prime Time entertainment with great embarrassment.

If you haven't yet begun rolling over, here's another one. A district police chief in Delhi once held a press conference claiming arrest of the accused within 24 hours in a case where two foreigners were raped. Nothing wrong with this just that he decided to get the victims to the press conference and paraded them in front of the media. He even gleefully agreed to pose for the cameras, with the two victims standing haplessly on either side. He was quickly shunted out as well. These strokes of geniuses came from a force which arguably is one of the better ones on a comparative, countrywide scale.

Like winning, being professional is a habit. Unfortunately, so is messing up. And I may not necessarily be correct in saying this, but police officers across the board are out to prove this theory right. They are messing up with alarming regularity. And leading this Operation Mess-Up are our khaki friends in Noida - a township which not only shares its boundaries with the capital of a country which is becoming the world's envy in several sectors, but also has amongst its residents thousands of architects of this great Indian development story.

At the rate we are getting to hear horror tales (of police investigations, not the crime), the entry gates of this sprawling modern township will soon need a new sign - in Almighty we trust, all others need to deal with Noida police. The story isn't dramatically different in our big Metros like Delhi and Mumbai, just that the police here stoically and efficiently believe a smooth lie is better than a distorted truth. And then proceed to pull off the lie more efficiently.

It's unfair to make sweeping generalisations. One should even be willing to concede a mistake of possibly a few percentage points. But it's perhaps fair to suspect about 90 per cent policemen are giving the rest a bad name. It's easy to question this, but let's just for once accept if there is one institution in India which continues its time-warped, cavernous existence, it's our police.

This explains what happened when a Swiss diplomat was raped near the Siri Fort auditorium in Delhi a few years ago. The police quickly established a highly educated, suave man was the strongest possible suspect. But then ran into an unexpected hurdle. They needed young sub-inspectors to infiltrate top end pubs and restaurants in south Delhi to pick up some scent of the suspect. They took over a week and hunted across the city's police stations and still barely managed to find 10 officers who could get inside such places without getting spotted from a mile. Delhi Police just didn't have enough men who fitted into the modern, urban milieu.

Fact is policing in India needs a huge reality check. We still recruit police personnel with an aim to control law and order, not to understand crime and society and consequently investigate and genuinely work out cases. Check out any recruitment camp that is organized annually by all state police forces for recruiting constables. The emphasis is on their ability to run a particular distance in a specified time, their height and chest size.

That may work fine when we only have to regulate rallies and dharnas, where a burly and menacing looking constabulary is adequate deterrence. But we must accept height and chest size of constables aren't the only skills needed to question a Dr Rajesh Talwar, a Maria Susairaj or a Moninder Singh Pandher or gather effective intelligence in an increasingly complex and a rapidly modernizing urban India.

Even the cutting edge of police forces - the sub-inspectors, who rise to become station heads, aren't necessarily recruited on their investigative abilities and a keen sense for detail. They are out of depth on social realities and a bit of science - key attributes required to be an efficient investigator.

The fact that the standards of supervisory policing by IPS officers are falling alarmingly each year, is now being discussed, even if it's in hushed tones. That an unacceptable percentage of aspirants are now choosing IPS as their choice for the wrong reasons completes this circle of embarrassing inefficiency and leads to the kind of probe handling we saw in the kidnapping of the Adobe India CEO's son, the Aarushi murder and the Nithari killings.

Quite remarkably, our administrators have chosen to ignore the rapidly developing complexities of urbanization, and have chosen to continue to allow a unilateral, pre-independence style of policing, perhaps simply because it suits their old-fashioned style of governance, where the criterion for posting isn't merit or skill. Indian politics still has virtually no urban leadership or thinking. The changing character of cities remains their one big blind spot.

They have failed to notice all major Indian cities are now ringed by an intensely mixed population, with migrants, casual workers and petty daily wage earners sharing their living and work space with IT professionals, management executives, creative fiends and fashion designers. They have failed to notice crime is no longer the domain of the de-notified tribes, history sheeters and the so called bad-characters listed out in a police station display boards. The mind of a criminal could belong to a doctor, an aspiring actress and a well-bred professional.

Yet, an SHO in-charge of policing a thana covering Sushant Lok or DLF Greens in Gurgaon or any of the swank sectors of Noida and Greater Noida one day, could be expected to be responsible for policing mofussil Rewari in Haryana or rustic Lalitpur in UP another day. We still haven't woken up to the fact that the skills needed to understand and police an urban, modern township would be totally different from those needed to tackle the hinterland.

And if a substantial number of ill-bred, brawn-flexing and instinctively feudal population co-habits with an urban professional mindset, the situation becomes even more complex. Just what seems to be the case in areas like Noida, Greater Noida and Gurgaon - three of the most rapidly expanding sub-urban townships of India, where police seem to struggle to come to terms with these new age realities and end up releasing details of text messages exchanged between teenagers, as if they had detected the most intriguing piece of evidence.

None of our administrators in any state have thought it fit to think creatively and work towards the twin thoughts of carving out a Metropolitan police force which is responsible for just the big cities and a separate, purely investigative wing for crime detection which isn't burdened by the demands of daily law and order duties.

In 1999, Delhi was numbed by the murder of journalist Shivani Bhatnagar. With no breakthrough for several weeks, the pressure was mounting by the day, especially as there was intense media scrutiny and interest around the case. Officers would suggest in hushed tones how only two people could be suspected - IPS officer R K Sharma (who has now been convicted) and Shivani's husband Rakesh. Several months later, a frustrated senior IPS officer supervising the case told us this murder was "just one slap away from being solved."

What he meant was he had a police force, so used to extracting confessions first and then working backwards in a bid to nail the suspect, that they were unable speed up the probe in a situation where one suspect was a senior IPS officer; the other was a senior journalist, which ruled out using the "slap" approach.

The police's inability to get out of the time warp also gets reflected in the lack of any breakthrough in most recent terrorist attack probes. While terrorists have become smarter, more efficient and work with a corporate-like efficiency in executing their task, the police struggle to even handle the basics. And those in governance perhaps do realize it; just that it seems to dawn on them only when it's politically expedient.

Why else would two state chief ministers' choose to send our friends in the Meteorological department into convulsive shivers, by choosing the weathermen's work ethic as a benchmark for containing terror in India? Why would they say central intelligence reports on possible terror attacks read like weather reports?

Though one isn't quite sure who is feeling more offended by this comparison - the Met office or our spooks - hindsight tells us our safety, security and the sense of confidence in the efficiency of our policing is now largely in God's hands. I suspect then, we have little choice but to beg God to take good care of himself. For if something happens to him, we sure are going to be in one big mess.