While allowing for the many difficulties confronting him, Tod cannot be held to have achieved much success as head of the police. His old critics, the Grand Jury, returned to the charge at the Sessions which opened on April 30th, 1787, and protested in strong terms against “the yet inefficient state of every branch of the Police, which required immediate and effectual amendment”. “That part of it” they said, “which had for its object the personal security of the inhabitants and their property was not sufficiently vigorous to prevent the frequent repetition of murder, felony, and every other species of atrociousness—defects that had often been the subject of complaint from the Grand Jury of Bombay, but never with more reason than at that Sessions, as the number of prisoners for various offences bore ample testimony.”
They animadverted on the want of proper regulations, on the great difficulty of obtaining menial servants and the still greater difficulty of retaining them in their service, on the enormous wages which they demanded and their generally dubious characters. So far as concerned the domestic servant problem, the Bombay public at the close of the eighteenth century seems to have been in a position closely resembling that of the middle-classes in England at the close of the Great War (1914-18). The Grand Jury complained also of the defective state of the high roads, of the uncleanliness of many streets in the Town, and of “the filthiness of some of the inhabitants, being uncommonly offensive and a real nuisance to society”. They objected to the obstruction caused by the piling of cotton on the Green and in the streets, to the enormous price of the necessaries of life, the bad state of the markets, and the high rates of labour. They urged the Justices to press the Bombay Government for reform and suggested “the appointment of a Committee of Police with full powers to frame regulations and armed with sufficient authority to carry them into execution, as had already been done with happy effect on the representation of the Grand Juries at the other Presidencies.”
The serious increase of robbery and “nightly depredations” was ascribed chiefly to the fact that all persons were allowed to enter Bombay freely, without examination, and that the streets were infested with beggars “calling themselves Faquiers and Jogees (Fakirs and Jogis)”, who exacted contributions from the public. The beggar-nuisance is one of the chief problems requiring solution in the modern City of Bombay: and it may be some consolation to a harassed Commissioner of Police to know that his predecessor of the eighteenth century was faced with similar difficulties. The Grand Jury were not over-squeamish in their recommendations on the subject. They advocated the immediate deportation of all persons having no visible means of subsistence, and as a result the police, presumably under Tod’s orders, sent thirteen suspicious persons out of the Island.[27]