TEAM HERALD
PANJIM: Eight years after after its inauguration, the Verna state forensics science laboratory (FSL) continues to remain a stockyard of viscera samples.
The building is in place and high-end equipment has been recently procured, but bureaucratic red-tapism and technical hassles have held up its functioning and a change in government has not got the lab functional.
From the installation of machinery, to repairs of damaged electrical wiring and fixing new one and recruitment of senior experts, everything is pending.
The crime branch, which is the nodal agency to dispatch viscera samples to laboratories, claims to have completed its share of work even as it is closely monitoring the project that also involves the Public Works Department and the Goa Public Service Commission (GPSC).
The only functional unit in the building is the integral part of the FSL – the finger prints bureau.
“We have regular meetings with concerned agencies like PWD. For recruitment of staff, GPSC has already released an advertisement and applications are coming in,” Inspector General of Police Sunil Garg told Herald.
For the present, the posts of director, assistant director, five scientific officers and 10 scientific assistants remain vacant. The laboratory currently has just two scientific officers.
The genuine difficulty the state has been facing is that though there a number of qualified forensic experts in Karnataka and Kerala who are willing to take up the job in Goa, their parent department has refused to relieve them.
“We are offering them a higher salary scale but it hasn’t yielded positive results despite many of them keen to associate with the Verna FSL. We had also written to different states, including central FSLs, but their respective state governments are holding them back,” a senior officer said.
The state resorted to appointment on deputation after failing its first step – promoting eligible experts – as Goa has none to match the work profile. Finally, an advertisement for the appointment of gazetted officers through GPSC was recently published across India. The posts have now lapsed, and a review proposal was recently put up before the government.
Crime branch Superintendent of Police Kartik Kashyap told Herald that interviews for the posts of lab technicians and lab attendants are currently underway.
Not only is recruitment of gazetted officers consuming time, installation of expensive machinery – for testing samples – is also lying unused. The lab suffered a major earthing problem and the company that delivered the equipment from abroad refused to refund the money in case the new equipment developed a snag during installation due to an earthing fault.
“The PWD failed to rectify the problem,” Kahyap said, adding that the department has recently sanctioned nearly Rs 3.5 lakh to the department to execute all the PWD-related works including installing ‘isolated transformer’ to ensure the earthing problem does not recur.
“We have completed 70 per cent of the work. Goa Police has done its share but we are also routinely following up with the agencies linked to this project to accomplish the remaining work,” Kashyap said.
PWD sources told Herald that infrastructure-related work remained pending, for it earlier failed to get bidders till a certain limit prescribed by the government.
These are enough reasons to say that Goa is equipped with a forensics lab but ill-equipped to test the samples, forcing it to remain dependent on other states.
However, Kashyap claimed that samples are being sent to the six FSLs in Karnataka. As per the agreement, FSLs located in Belgaum, Gulbarga and Mangalore are taking cases of north Goa jurisdiction; and the labs at Bangalore, Mysore and Davangere accept samples from the south district. Each FSL accepts 30 samples, which are being sent on a priority basis.
