Stay updated with the latest - Click here to follow us on Instagram
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
FROM examining meat samples to check if they are beef, conducing DNA tests to establish paternity of a child, settling property disputes, to testing vaginal swabs that confirm if an accused is the rapist, the DNA department of the Maharashtra Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) has over the past year seen an exponential growth in its workload.
Staffers and infrastructure, however, have not seen a parallel increase, leading to the department getting overburdened.
[related-post]
An official pointed to a few factors for this rise. First, the officer said that across Maharashtra, they receive at least 25 cases of meat to be tested for beef, ever since beef was banned in Maharashtra in March 2015. “Earlier there were no such cases. However, now every month we get at least 25 such cases, which adds to our workload,” the official said.
In 2012, the department handed 1,500 cases, which rose by 80 per cent to 2,700 in 2015. In fact, in the first two months of the current year itself, the DNA department has already tested 25 per cent — 652 cases — of the total cases it dealt with in the past year. The FSL estimates that the current year will see more than 4,000 cases handled by the DNA division.
Apart from the beef cases, the official said they have started receiving several cases from family courts of couples fighting custody battles. “Ever since the past year, we have been getting four to five paternity test cases per month, which comes upto nearly 60 cases annually. Earlier, we would get one or two cases in six months,” an official said.
Apart from the paternity test, there are cases of property disputes where DNA samples are sent to the FSL to confirm that a person claiming inheritance to a property is indeed a member of the family. “We do receive cases where siblings allege that a particular person is not their brother/sister but a cousin, and hence not entitled to a share in the property. In such cases the samples are sent to us to confirm if the person belongs to the family or not,” an official said.
Apart from these two factors, the laboratory has also been flooded with cases from police stations across the state, with greater awareness among the staff about the value of forensic reports as evidence. “Earlier, the police staff was not that aware about collecting evidence from the crime scene and sending it to us. Now, with emphasis on a better conviction rate, we receive more cases from across the state,” the official added.
A senior FSL official said they had sent a proposal to the government to increase the number of people in the department. “We have asked for 70 – 80 more people. Currently, there is a staff of nearly 40 persons working at the Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur units of the FSL, where the DNA facility is available,” he said.
mohamed.thaver@expressindia.com
Stay updated with the latest - Click here to follow us on Instagram
