1,764 cops were booked in bribery cases

The Asian Age: Mumbai: Sunday, 12 April 2015.

The ACB has managed to convict only 177 of them while 573 have been acquitted.

The Maharashtra Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) trapped as many as 1,764 police officials and constabulary from the state police department between 2000 and 2014 i.e. in 15 years. However, they have so far succeeded in convicting only 177 of them while 573 have been acquitted, reveals a RTI reply accessed by The Asian Age.

Reacting to it, ACB’s director general Praveen Dixit said, “The conviction rate depends on after how many years a particular case has been heard in the court.” In the past, Mr Dixit had cited the long pending cases in courts as one of the major factors for low conviction rate. Out of the 1,764 cases against the police, 734 are pending in courts.

Apart from conviction, acquittal and pending court cases, the rest of the cases never reached teh court due to lack of evidence besides a handful of them that are either being probed or haven’t received prosecution sanction from the concerned government departments.

The ACB website states that the police and revenue departments have undisputedly topped the infamous list of allegedly being the most corrupt departments since 2009.

Another glaring factor is that the conviction rate for the police department within the same time period is lesser than that of the revenue department, except in Nagpur and Nashik range. Going by the method adopted by the ACB to calculate the conviction rate, which considers only those cases that have completed trial, conviction rate of revenue department is 26 per cent while for the police it is 23.3 per cent.

When asked if the conviction rate was comparatively low because the ACB comprises of men who also belong to Maharashtra police force, Mr Dixit said, “Accused from all departments are probed impartially and thoroughly.”

Interestingly, about 1,594 officials from the revenue department have been trapped for accepting bribes, which is lesser than those trapped from police. However, the number of accused who have been convicted from the revenue department are more than the conviction rate in the police department. About 609 accused from the revenue department have been acquitted, while cases pertaining to 692 of them are pending in courts.

The Washim ACB unit of Amravati range started in 2009 and hence is not included in the given table. Since 2009, the unit has trapped 14 policemen and 13 officials from the revenue department, and from each department nine cases are pending in courts.