WORLD REPORT PROFILE : Kiran Bedi : INDIA’S TOP FEMALE COP : Her prison reforms and ‘loud conscience’ brought her honors--and envy. Now, she’s been ‘busted’ to a desk job.

It may have been the breakfast of cold tea and cornflakes in the company of Bill and Hillary Clinton that was the last straw for her jealous superiors, India’s top female cop believes.

For the last two years, India’s newspapers have been filled with glowing reports about the transformations Kiran Bedi was performing inside Tihar jail in New Delhi, said to be Asia’s largest.

For her innovative, humanitarian changes benefiting the 9,000 men and women behind the prison’s bars--bringing in counselors and child care, for instance--Bedi, as the state of Delhi’s inspector general of prisons, won Asia’s prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award.

In the first three months of this year, she was invited to a prayer breakfast with President and Mrs. Clinton and 5,000 others in Washington and to the U.N. summit on development in Copenhagen.

Those were occasions for pride. This month came the fall: Bedi was bounced from her job.

“I was in a very suffocating position. Not in the prison, no! That was one of the best postings I’ve had,” India’s No. 1 policewoman said after her ouster, half-nostalgic, half-angry.

The problem, she said, was that “the kind of cheer and hope there was inside the prison was suffocated outside.”

Her fall was sensational news. For Bedi, 45, the first woman admitted to the Indian Police Service, one of the country’s elite government bureaucracies, is one of the few civil servants whose careers Indians follow with the enthusiasm usually reserved for cricket or soccer stars.

That’s because Bedi, who won the International Lawn Tennis Championship of Asia at age 22 in spite of her diminutive 5-foot, 3 1/2-inch size, has a reputation for prickly uprightness in a system more renowned for venality and laxity.

“I brook no nonsense or interference, whatever be the sacrifices or consequences,” Bedi said in an interview at the colonial era bungalow she has been allotted to supplement her meager after-tax, take-home salary of $150 a month.

She credits her parents for her “loud conscience.” Her father was a well-to-do landholder from Punjab, but would drop all business for his daily 2 p.m. tennis match; and her mother communicated a “thirst for academics” to her four children, all daughters.

Today, her father, 74, and mother, 68, live with her in New Delhi. Bedi, who married a fellow tennis player a month after winning the 1972 championship, has one child of her own--a daughter, 20, who is studying to be a physician.

It was Bedi’s take-charge style and sense of duty, as well as “one invitation too many” to receive honors abroad, she now believes, that set off the latest fireworks in her career.

And she blames Harcharan Singh Balli, the local official in charge of prisons, for getting her unceremoniously transferred out of her job at Tihar jail.

Around the beginning of May, newspaper leaks began accusing Bedi of improperly wangling foreign invitations, flouting security by allowing “mobs of people” to visit prisoners in Tihar jail and violating prison regulations by letting an accused murderer have an electric typewriter.

Few people in power want to talk about the circumstances, but P.K. Dave, the lieutenant governor of the state of Delhi, which encompasses New Delhi, the national capital, reportedly wrote a letter to India’s home minister accusing Bedi of being a media showboat and calling for her transfer.

On May 3, she was suddenly informed she was being shifted to another assignment.

Khushwant Singh, the country’s most widely read columnist, said Bedi’s bosses were jealous that her work at Tihar was earning her international acclaim, awards and invitations by the fistful while they were not getting any. But not all Indians were cheering for the beleaguered Bedi. In an earlier flap, the controversial policewoman had been transferred to the remote Indian northeast after officers under her orders, and toting canes, charged a group of lawyers outside Tis Hazari, this city’s central court complex. In the mid 1980S, as chief of traffic police in the capital, she made motorists furious (and inspired the nickname of “Crane” Bedi) by ordering police to tow away illegally parked cars.

It was after she was relieved of command at the prison that she met with an American reporter in her New Delhi bungalow. Attired in a neatly pressed white pajama suit and olive-drab camouflage vest, her straight black hair coiffed in a boyish cut, Bedi was trying to cope with inactivity.

“For the first day, I have felt liberated,” she said as she offered a seat to her visitor in a room crammed with plaques, awards, diplomas and other symbols of tribute. But she admitted she was still trying to come to grips with her unexpected and humiliating transfer.

“My anger within me is too strong when they are hypocrites,” Bedi fumed, her upper lip curling in fury.

What hurt the most, she said, was that she was never given a chance to answer the accusations floated against her in the press or to formally contest the transfer.

Take the most serious charge against her, that security was breached at Tihar, Bedi said. True, she opened the jail to the community to an unprecedented degree. But no regulations were breached, she insisted. And when she walked out of Tihar for the last time she left behind 70 community counselors, 10 volunteer psychiatrists, 30 libraries boasting hundreds of thousands of books, a children’s day-care center for inmate mothers and educational courses from basic literacy training to computers.

None of these services, she noted proudly, were there before.

Incensed over her ouster, Bedi went public with criticism of Lt. Gov. Dave and Balli, the local prisons official. She even criticized the workings of Indian democracy, declaring: “What I see every day today is that the country and the society are looking for one set of solutions, and the system is giving them absolutely the opposite.”

With such blasts, Bedi crossed the line of permissible behavior for a civil servant in the eyes of many Indians and set herself up for another humiliation. Originally, she had been informed that her next assignment was to take charge of training for New Delhi’s police.

All in all, it was a satisfying job prospect. “I’m a total teacher at heart; they are sending me to the right place,” she declared.

But the day before Bedi was to make her debut in the new job, the realization dawned on her superiors that putting her in charge of training rookie and veteran police officers might lead to an entire generation of Kiran Bedis.

So Lt. Gov. Dave canceled the assignment and ordered Bedi to report to another post, that of additional police commissioner for planning and policy implementation. It sounded like a dead-end desk job. But a subdued Bedi dutifully reported for work the next day.

“I have got to move on. I have got to live in today. And work for tomorrow,” she said.