Kiran Bedi

Kiran Bedi joined the Indian Police Service in 1972 as its first woman officer, and built much of her reputation on social work carried out from inside the police rather than alongside it. She retired in 2007 as Director General of the Bureau of Police Research and Development, saying she wanted to concentrate on social work and writing, and now runs two organisations she founded: the Navjyoti India Foundation and the India Vision Foundation.

The first grew out of a posting. Made Deputy Commissioner of Police for north Delhi in 1986, Bedi found widespread drug addiction and a single treatment centre serving the city. She opened a detoxification centre in police premises, furnished largely by community donations and staffed in part by volunteer doctors and yoga teachers; five more followed within a year, each intended for about thirty patients but in practice handling around a hundred. Before her transfer, Bedi and fifteen other officers converted the centres into a standing body, the Navjyoti Delhi Police Foundation for Correction, De-addiction and Rehabilitation, with Bedi as general secretary. Renamed the Navjyoti India Foundation in 2007, it went on to provide residential treatment to close to 20,000 drug and alcohol users over the following quarter-century, and broadened into crime prevention through schooling for street and slum children, around 200 single-teacher schools, vocational training, health care and counselling. In 2010 it opened the Navjyoti Community College, affiliated to IGNOU. The foundation received the Serge Sotiroff Memorial Award for contributions to international drug control in 1999.

Her best-known work was at Tihar Jail, where she was posted as Inspector General of Delhi Prisons in May 1993. The complex had been built for 2,500 prisoners and held between 8,000 and 9,500, some nine-tenths of them undertrials waiting years for a hearing, on a budget that barely covered basics. Bedi separated hardened offenders who had been running rackets from inside, set up legal cells for undertrials, and brought Indira Gandhi National Open University and the National Open School inside to run courses. She introduced yoga and Vipassana meditation, banned smoking, opened a de-addiction centre and acted against staff supplying drugs, and started a bakery, carpentry and weaving units whose profits went to a prisoners' welfare fund. A panchayat of respected inmates met senior officers each evening, and petition boxes gave prisoners a route to the Inspector General that the staff could not intercept. Fights and disturbances fell. When she was transferred out in May 1995 after a political dispute, inmates went on hunger strike in protest. The Ramon Magsaysay Award followed in 1994, citing her work in crime control, drug rehabilitation and humane prison reform; the reforms were also the subject of the documentary Doing Time, Doing Vipassana.

Bedi set up the India Vision Foundation in 1994 to work on police reform, prison reform, women's empowerment and rural and community development. On policing she has argued for better training, against the hazing of recruits and against frequent transfers, and has proposed an additional tier of police administration to insulate rank-and-file officers from political pressure; on women's rights she has pressed for equal educational opportunity and for property ownership, including co-ownership, by women. In 2011 an FIR was registered against her over travel expenses billed through the foundation; the investigation found no evidence of fraud or diversion of funds and the case was closed. She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by the CUNY School of Law in 2005 for her approach to prison reform and policing.[3]