Bhubaneswar: With around 50 per cent vacant posts, the State Finger Print Bureau, which plays a vital role in assisting police officials in investigating crimes, has performed dismally over the last few years.
State Finger Print Bureau (SFPB) of Odisha, which had been operating since 1936 at Cuttack, was shifted to Bhubaneswar in 1970. Fingerprint experts assist police officials in their investigations by visiting the crime scene and matching the chance prints developed at the Scene of Crime (SoC) with FP database stored at the SFPB.
It also matches fingerprint impressions of suspects with the database to find out their past criminal antecedents. However, the recently published annual Finger Print in India report for 2019 by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has exposed the poor show of the bureau as compared to other states.
The report revealed that around 50 per cent posts are lying vacant in SFPB and its districts-level boards. The NCRB report for 2018 too indicated glaring vacancies earlier.
“States like Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Maharashtra, have recorded tens of thousands of fingerprint slips. Karnataka, Bihar, Kerala Odisha, West Bengal, Uttrakhand and Telangana are underperformers,” the NCRB stated in its 2018 report.
As per the report, there were 51, 678 Ten-digit fingerprint slips of convicted persons at SFPB here till December 31, 2019.
The SFPB received fingerprint impressions of 62 persons convicted under various crimes during 2019. Out of these, 3 were discarded as defective, while 59 were stored at the database for future reference.
The SFPB received 7,591 fingerprint marks of arrested persons from the investigating officers, who requested the bureau to search its database for the past criminal antecedent of the arrestee.
The total number of search slip requests at the bureau was 1,74,620 that includes 1,67,466 pending
requests at the beginning of the year.
Meanwhile, SFPB Odisha managed to trace the past criminal record of the accused in 515 cases. On the other hand, Gujarat SFPB traced the highest number of fingerprints in as many as 69,636 cases in 2019 across the country.
Gyan Ranjan Mohapatra, OP