FIR must for all complaints

Delhi circular after Ruchika tragedy

ANANYA SENGUPTA

New Delhi, Dec. 28: Police will now have to file an FIR on every complaint, the Union home ministry said today, ending the decades-old practice of lodging general diaries that allowed the law-keepers to sit on complaints without investigation.

The move is a fallout of the high-profile Ruchika Girhotra molestation case where Haryana police had initially refused to file an FIR (first information report), apparently because the accused was a senior officer.

The ministry is expected to send a circular to all the states by early next week, making it mandatory for station house officers to register FIRs on virtually every complaint. The SHOs must also state their reasons for registering any FIR —or not registering one if they felt a complaint was obviously false — to their superiors in writing, sources said.

The police can therefore no longer use the device of the diary, where they jotted down complaints and forgot all about them. Registering an FIR means the police must report to a magistrate, who then monitors the progress of investigation. The case cannot be closed without the magistrate’s permission.

A diary allows the police to avoid the trouble of investigation, arrests, chargesheets and prosecution.

From now on, sources said, even if a complaint is false, the police will be expected to probe it before they drop it.

Indian police are notorious for refusing to lodge FIRs, especially if the complainants are poor, as in the Nithari serial child rapes and murders. (See chart)

A Right to Information application from an NGO has forced Delhi police to admit lodging FIRs in only 9.5 per cent of child disappearances even after Nithari. The NGO has also found out that less than 12 per cent rape complaints are turned into FIRs. This despite victims’ families often sitting in front of police stations for hours — even days — imploring the cops to act.

Neetu Srivastav, a day labourer in Ghaziabad, told The Telegraph that for the past one year, she had been travelling to the local police station every day and pleading in vain for an FIR to be filed to trace her missing daughter Pallavi, now 14. Another RTI plea has found out that at least 800 complainants in Lucknow had to fight court cases to get FIRs registered in 2006 and 2007.

Under the Raj, almost every complaint was expected to lead to an FIR but practices changed as cases burgeoned after Independence.