Hyderabad, April 25:• About 1,500 viscera samples are lying in the open in the second floor lobby of the department of toxicology at the Central Forensic Science Laboratory. The cold storage room is spilling over. The department already has a backlog of nearly 2,000 cases and six people to work on them.

• Of the sanctioned strength of 127 officers, 51 posts are vacant, including 29 positions of scientific officers and lab assistants.

• The deputy director of the explosives department also doubles up as the data entry operator at the National Bomb Data Centre of the CFSL.

This is the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Hyderabad, the country’s premier forensic testing institute. The CFSL receives over 3,000 samples every year and with such workload, the place should be buzzing with activity. But a walk through the corridors of the multi-storied building reveals fully-equipped laboratories with big locks on the doors, expensive equipment worth over Rs 25 crore gathering dust in the rooms of all the departments, and samples lying around, waiting to be taken up for examination.

Most of the chambers of scientific officers—crucial for analysis and examination of samples—are either locked or unoccupied. In fact, the lights are on only in a few corners of the CFSL simply because there are no people in the offices.

Of the total sanctioned strength of 127 officers, there are 51 vacancies. Six of the 10 posts of deputy directors are vacant, three of the 10 assistant directors posts are vacant. Of the total 14 senior scientific officers, 10 posts are vacant. Of the 17 posts for junior scientific officers, eight are vacant, there are five senior scientific assistants when there should have been 11 while there is only one laboratory assistant against the sanctioned strength of six.

In the chemistry department, a single scientific officer is at work in a huge, well-equipped lab. Equipment worth over Rs 3 crore remains underutilized because there is no staff. So the process of disposing of cases is very slow.

The entire explosives department has just two officers, including the deputy director who is the head. Both of them take turns to manage the National Bomb Data Centre, which was established to create a data bank of all improvised explosive device-related bombing incidents across the country.

One of the most important wings of CFSL, the toxicology department, which tests viscera samples, faces a crippling staff shortage. There are two deputy directors and three assistant directors but four people—a senior scientific officer, a senior scientific assistant, a scientific assistant and a lab assistant—do all the work.

With an annual budget of Rs 32 crore, the CFSL is equipped with some of the most advanced testing equipment, including gas chromatography mass spectrometry, liquid chromatography mass spectrometry, fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, FT Raman, Ion scan etc. But all the rooms or mini-labs where the equipment is kept are locked. In fact, the deputy or assistant director of the particular department keeps a bunch of keys with him and moves around switching on lights and opening and locking the labs as and when he requires to use the machines.

CFSL Director Dr S.K. Shukla, who was attending a training workshop of police personnel, simply said the lab was doing its best to clear the backlog. “There is a staff shortage and we badly need scientific officers and assistants and technicians because they are the people who do 90 per cent of the work. We have very senior and experienced head of departments but no staff below them,” Dr Shukla says. “Due to the staff crunch, the backlog has increased.” he says.

The last recruitment happened in 1993 and for the last 10 years, there have been no promotions in the lab.

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