DNA pundits ignored in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh
Decision after CDFD demanded money for tests.
Hyderabad: The Telangana State and Andhra Pradesh police are not using the services of the Hyderabad-based Centre For DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD) as the Central agency has asked state agencies to pay for tests. The Telangana State Forensic Science Laboratory refused to enter into an agreement with CDFD.
The CDFD released its annual report on Thursday which said that it has done tests like DNA profiling to identify Indians who died in the Flydubai aircraft crash in Russia and the sexual assault case on women tourists from Delhi in Goa.
The statistics provided by CDFD revealed that Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have sent very few cases to CDFD for identifying the accused in rape and murder cases compared to previous years.
An official of APFSL said, “Earlier we had a MoU with CDFD and they used to do cases free. As we are short- staffed and they have good manpower we used to send cases. TSFSL does have expertise to conduct the tests. The only problem is staff shortage. When we wanted to renew the MoU, CDFD demanded a few thousand rupees per case. So we decided to do them in our lab. Hence, we didn’t renew the agreement. We do around 1,000 to 1,200 cases every year more than CDFD.”
In 2015-16, MP forwarded the highest number of cases numbering 176 followed by TS with 55 cases, Chattisgarh 49 cases and AP 27 cases, out of 397 cases.
In 2014-15 MP forwarded 197 cases followed by AP with 103, Telangana 79 and Chattisgarh 40 out of 559 cases. In 2013-14 out of the 403 cases, AP and TS together availed services of the CDFD in 233 cases, followed by MP in 53 cases.
Interestingly, countries like the Democr-atic Republic of Timor-Leste are also using the services of CDFD. Around 41 per cent of the cases are identifying the dead. 24 per cent of the cases are maternity and paternity tests, 5 per cent murders, 25 per cent rape cases and 5 per cent relationship cases. The CDFD earned Rs 73.38 lakh from DNA tests in 2015-16 against Rs 1.19 crore the previous year.