Teaching or Training
We call ourselves a training academy but in essence we are a teaching academy. The best of teaching and just a notion of training! Submerged in academic domain and nowhere in public domain!
It is not just so much a flaw in training delivery at police academies. It owes also to the design and scheme of police training, wherein the basics stand isolated from the applied. One is taught to be a police officer in the training institution and trained to be a police officer in a police station or a police office in the district. The contrasting environment under which the two aspects are imparted cannot relate to each other. The dichotomy becomes overpowering for the individual trainee. Insulated at the academy s/he is no match, for example, to the prevailing guiles in a police station.
Having passed out from the portals of the academy, the trainee heads to allotted district in order to learn the ways of practical policing. During this phase s/he spends considerable time in police station in order to get exposed to the ways of applied policing. This is the most vital phase on account of the police station being central to core policing as also to entire super structure of Indian Police system. This is also the phase when the trainee would be most vulnerable because the training institutions do not train them to face a police station. The training in the Police Academy does pretty little to stamp the centrality of police station in the DNA of a trainee. S/he stands as an outsider before the Police Station.
The districts and the police stations have no cadre of trainers, and all the while the district SsP are too busy in their routine, and the police station staff remain mostly compromised and disoriented. After the best of class room teachers, academically enriching and morally correct, now await for the trainees the worst of practical guides, conditioned in patch-work and unscrupulous routines! Not surprisingly they go down to the level of their new trainers very fast.
How should a police academy respond to this seemingly inevitable slide? Obviously by becoming a training academy in real sense, a platform for inculcating applied aspects of policing as well. By giving real life competencies and direction to its cadets to lead in districts and police stations so that they could be agents of change rather than followers of status-quo. By thoroughly sensitizing and orienting them. By making police station a vital part of their DNA.

- Director, SVPNPA Hyderabad.