Case evidence piling up in police storage, getting damaged

It is concerning to learn that important pieces of case evidence are kept like garbage in many of the police maalkhanas (areas where evidence is stored) due to lack of proper facilities to preserve them. According to a report in this daily on Saturday, items considered evidence in various cases have been found lying haphazardly in the shabby, damp maalkhanas of our police stations—many of them for as long as 20 years. Also, the maalkhanas in many police stations are so small that case evidence are often kept in open spaces like rooftops, verandas, makeshift tin-shed structures, corridors or stair rooms, and even in generator rooms. Our reporters visited 33 police stations last year and found this worrying picture with an exception in the DMP maalkhana where most of the evidence was kept with a tag number, known as Properties Register (PR) number, on it and the same number is also written on a register book for easy tracing. 

While lack of space is the most important reason for such a deplorable condition of evidence preservation, delay in case disposal is another reason. It doesn't make any sense why there should be 20-year-old case evidence in the maalkhanas. Why can't a case be disposed of in 20 years? Won't the evidence get damaged after so long? This points to the limitation of our justice system where cases remain pending for years without any acceptable reason. Reportedly, there are still around 37 lakh cases pending with higher and lower courts of the country. As the number of cases is increasing every day, case evidence are also piling up in police stations.

Another issue that needs to be resolved is where the evidence should be kept after the police submit the charge sheet in a case to the court. According to an OC working in the capital, a few years ago, courts requested the police not to submit evidence to them along with charge sheets and asked them to preserve the evidence instead, because the courts also do not have enough spaces to preserve them.

The situation is extremely worrying and needs immediate attention of the authorities concerned. Properly preserving case evidence is very important for convicting the real accused in a case. Since a good number of our police stations are situated in old and damp buildings, chances of evidence getting damaged is also quite high. Therefore, the government should consider renovating the old police buildings and arrange proper facilities for evidence preservation. We have learned that a proposal to renovate and reconstruct the old thana buildings has been given to the home ministry. We hope the ministry will work on this on a priority basis. Moreover, the government must ensure speedy trial process in all cases to reduce case backlogs due to which our police stations are struggling to preserve the evidence properly.