New Delhi: The Ministry of Home Affairs has directed the state governments of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Telangana to recruit fingerprint officials in their state bureaus following the maximum number of vacancies in said bureaus. "Fingerprint bureau always plays a major role in solving crime cases. However, several State governments don't have adequate manpower in their bureaus," said an MHA official to ETV Bharat on Thursday.
According to the government statistics, against a total sanctioned strength of 307 fingerprint officials in Maharashtra including director, superintendent of police, senior police inspector, police inspector, and others, the state has a posted strength of 188 officials and a vacancy in 119 positions.
Similarly, against a sanctioned strength of 381 officials in its fingerprint bureau, Tamil Nadu has a posted strength of 262 and 119 vacancies whereas Telangana has only 59 personnel posted against a sanctioned strength of 159, resulting in a total vacancy of 100.
States such as Tripura, Sikkim, Rajasthan, Punjab, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Haryana, Gujarat, Delhi, Chhattisgarh, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh too have shortages of manpower in their respective fingerprint bureaus. The main responsibility of a fingerprint official is to develop chance prints left by criminals at the crime scene and to match those with existing prints in the database.
Fingerprint experts also receive fingerprint slips of arrested persons for adding them to the existing fingerprint database. In 2021, the fingerprint units of state fingerprint bureau, police and other staff have visited a total of 52,602 crime scenes, where they developed 70,204 chance prints out of which 53,281 chance prints were found for comparison, ministry data revealed.
In the same year, a total of 2,961 cases have been solved through chance prints. As per data, Madhya Pradesh has the highest number of fingerprint slips recorded in one year for conviction of criminals for murder, grievous hurt, rape and attempt to murder. "We are trying to augment all State fingerprint bureaus with latest and sophisticated scientific tools and gadgets so that it can add plus point in the investigation process," the MHA official said.
Some of the major fingerprint equipment available with the Stage fingerprint bureaus are lenin testers, stand magnifier PFP 200, CED 2000 comparator, fingerprint developing kit among others. The official further informed that a huge chunk of the Union budget allotted for the Home Ministry in 2022-23 will be utilised for the upgradation of the fingerprint bureaus under the police modernization process.
