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Journalism of Courage
PUNE, Aug 6: For reasons best known to it, the Maharashtra Government is dragging its feet over the promotion of assistant public prosecutors APPs, formerly known as police prosecutors, as additional public prosecutors, and giving them charge independent of the police department.
Even though the Maharashtra State Public Prosecutors8217; Association has approached the Supreme Court to demand a change in status, police prosecutors continue to spend their life working on small cases in judicial magistrate first class courts when there is an apparent shortage of government pleaders in the district court with numbers having been reduced from 22 to 16 in the past two months.
8220;The affidavit was accepted by SC in September 1997, but the Maharashtra Government has still not acted on the commitment,8221; said Vishwanath Pai, senior advocate and former president of the Pune Bar Association. This has meant that employees on the verge of retirement have been uncertain about their fate.
Twenty-six assistant public prosecutors, including three from Pune, were, on paper, promoted to the ranks of assistant directors of public prosecution and additional public prosecutors, on June 26, 1998, but have still not received any intimation about where they would be posted or what their duties will be. This, despite the fact that had the retirement age not been extended, two of the officers would have retired on July 31 and another on August 30.
Assistant public prosecutors spend their careers handling small cases at lower courts on fixed salaries, without any avenues for promotion or any freedom because they come under the police department.
8220;Over the past two months the number of additional public prosecutors in the district court has come down from 24 to 18 and this means delayed proceedings and additional burden on existing APPs. Cases which were disposed of within a week now stretch for months because public prosecutors have to handle more than one trial in a day, which is not always possible,8221; says Pai.
