Bihar govt empowers ASIs to handle liquor cases

PATNA: The state government has rolled out an ordinance amending the Bihar Excise and Prohibition Act, 2016 retrospectively and empowering even assistant sub-inspector (ASI) rank officers of state police to search and seize liquors and investigate prohibition-related cases.
Earlier, sub-inspector and above ranked officers were permitted to enter, inspect, search and seize or investigate prohibition cases.
The Bihar Prohibition and Excise (Amendment and Validation) Ordinance, 2020 would be deemed to have come into force on October 2, 2016 when Bihar Excise and Prohibition Act, 2016 was enacted. The ordinance also mentions that the Act shall have overriding effect and all acts done according to the provisions of Bihar Excise and Prohibition Act, 2016 by ASIs shall be deemed to be valid.
This amendment is aimed at empowering government to challenge even those cases in which any accused had been already granted relief, including acquittal by the court, on grounds that an ASI had handled the case.
On June 16, IG (prohibition) Amrit Raj had written to all SSPs and SPs to immediately hand over the investigation of prohibition-related cases to SIs or inspectors if earlier handled by ASI-rank officer.
Raj had mentioned the ill-effects of ASIs conducting search, seizure and investigation as the accused were getting benefits during trial of cases. He had highlighted Section 73(E) of the Act where search and preparing seizure list could not be done by any officer below SI-rank as per Section 78(2). Only these two sections were amended by substituting the word sub-inspector with assistant sub-inspector.
In the ordinance, lack of SIs in state police had been cited as the reason behind the amendment. The sanctioned strength of SIs is 17,535 but there were only 8,669 in state police. Of them, 4661 are working with investigation wing while the rest 4008 are engaged in maintaining law and order.
When asked, advocate Satyabir Bharti said there were several cases in which the Patna high court had granted relief to the accused as search and seizure by an ASI were declared illegal. “However, in my opinion, amending criminal law with retrospective effect is violation of Article 20 (1) of the Constitution,” he said.