The economic growth has brought not only value to the real estate but also disputes along with it. In the last couple of years, the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) is increasingly getting more cases of forgery of documents to probe. The forged papers pertaining to land or property disputes are related to general power of attorney or sale agreement.
In the last few years, the FSL has received over 500 cases each year, and pendency of cases in the last three years is about 1,000 owing to shortage of staff to examine the documents. At the end of 2020, the pendency of cases in questioned documents was 1,017, data from the Police Department shows. In all, 9,958 articles in 1,017 cases needed to be analysed at the end of 2020. Of these, three cases are from 2016.
Additional Director-General of Police (Crime and Technical Services) R. Hithendra acknowledged that the number of questioned documents before the FSL had increased in the last couple of years. He pointed out at real estate becoming a prime economic mover in cities such as Bengaluru. “In many cases, the analysis of questioned documents is taking at least one-and-a-half years to be completed. New officers are being hired and efforts are being made to bring down the pendency and the time taken for analysis is expected to come down to about a month.” Scientific officers with skills to analyse documents are being recruited and that is expected to bring down pendency, he added.
According to Mr. Hithendra, the current case analysis rate is about 60 to 70 questioned documents, which is expected to be increased to analysis of 80 to 100 documents, which will sharply bring down the pendency. Besides, the time required to issue a report by the FSL would be brought down to about one month from the current 15 to 17 months.
The FSL, apart from criminal cases, also receives civil cases referred by civil courts by appointing a handwriting examiner as court commissioner. Such cases are being returned without examination citing a large number of pending criminal cases. If accepted, these cases further aggravate pendency, a note said. While 111 court-referred cases were returned without examination in 2018, it was 124 and 120 in 2019 and 2020, respectively.
The High Court of Karnataka has already rapped the State government over the delay by taking up a suo motu case after it found several cases piling up due to delayed reports by the FSL. This has led the government to draw a three-year action plan to upgrade forensic assessment and research in the State by investing on infrastructure and personnel.
While the High Court-mandated improvement in the Forensic Science Laboratory is being put in place, initial proposals to have branches other than the traditional 13 sections — such as vehicle forensics, drones forensics, and forensics to analyse electronics — is also being mooted. “With most modern cars having chips from where data can be recovered, investigation of accidents and thefts need to be upgraded. As there is an increase in the number of drones, there is a necessity to have skills to assess impacts of drones,” Mr. Hithendra said. Among others, he said in the years to come as e-wallets and smart homes increase, these also need to have skilled analysers in these sections.