Human action recognition is an essential process in surveillance video analysis, which is used to understand the behavior of people to ensure safety. Most of the existing methods for HAR use computationally heavy networks such as 3D CNN and two-stream networks. To alleviate the challenges in the implementation and training of 3D deep learning networks, which have more parameters, a customized lightweight directed acyclic graph-based residual 2D CNN with fewer parameters was designed from scratch and named HARNet. A novel pipeline for the construction of spatial motion data from raw video input is presented for the latent representation learning of human actions. The constructed input is fed to the network for simultaneous operation over spatial and motion information in a single stream, and the latent representation learned at the fully connected layer is extracted and fed to the conventional machine learning classifiers for action recognition. The proposed work was empirically verified, and the experimental results were compared with those for existing methods. The results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods with a percentage improvement of 2.75% on UCF101, 10.94% on HMDB51, and 0.18% on the KTH dataset.