By Damian Grammaticas
BBC News, Delhi
**Police in India are guilty of widespread human rights violations, including beatings, torture and illegal killings, a new report alleges.**The US-based group Human Rights Watch says India’s policing system facilitates and even encourages abuses.
It says there has been little change in attitudes, training or equipment since the police was formed in colonial times with the aim to control the population.
It says the government must take major steps to overhaul a failing system.
There was no immediate response from the Indian authorities.
‘Under pressure’
The catalogue of abuses by India’s police detailed in this report is long and shocking - arbitrary arrests, beatings and torture to force confessions, even the cold-blooded gunning down of innocent people.
The campaigning group Human Rights Watch spent a year investigating claims of human rights violations.
Ill-equipped and under pressure to fight crime, police officers often take the law into their own hands, the report says.
Human Rights Watch says that as India has modernised fast, its police have been left behind.
They now require a major overhaul otherwise the beatings, torture and illegal killings will continue to stain India’s democracy, the report adds.