Delhi Police's decision to send Sunanda Pushkar's viscera abroad for a detailed opinion on the cause of her death cannot be faulted for two reasons. The first is that additional expert opinion is always welcome. And the second is that no chances can be taken in a high-profile case of this nature. Nevertheless, the decision does put the spotlight on India's forensic science capabilities and the need for them to be of international standards. This is not to point fingers at the country's existing forensic science laboratories or the well-qualified personnel managing them, but to emphasise the need for facilities that are one step ahead of the methods criminals used.
The Sunanda Pushkar case is an example of how forensics play a crucial element in contemporary criminal investigations — and also how investigating officials in India are often restricted in their work because of the lack of advanced technologies in this field at home. Tests indicate that Sunanda Pushkar died of poisoning but investigators do not have the resources to determine what kind of poison killed her or how much of it went into her system. These details can be invaluable in ascertaining the cause of her death. Indian investigators usually depend on the victim’s physical symptoms in suspected poisoning cases but they are at a loss when uncommon poisons or substances that do not leave obvious physical signs are involved.
Moreover, there is a tendency to think of forensics as just the laboratory work done on body fluids when, in fact, this is a vast field that the studies almost the entire gamut of human existence and beyond. Most of us are aware of how finger prints can be lifted from crime scenes and how one strand of hair or a drop of blood can be enough for DNA evidence which can nail a criminal (or exonerate wrongly convicted persons). But forensics also extends, for example, to the study of handwriting on the hand, and the study of weather patterns, on the other. Analysing blood spatter patterns (a science in itself) can offer important clues of how a victim was been shot or stabbed while studying a car wreckage can help reconstruct the events of a motor accident.
Scutinising financial records in money laundering cases is a classic example of forensic accounting while art forensic technican can help museums and auction houses detect fake paintings and sculptures. Cyber forensics is another emerging sub-field that extends from developing software to detect the emotions of a suspect during interrogation to retrieving encrypted data from computer hard drives. Against this backdrop, it can be said that Indian forensics needs not just an upgrade (in terms of new technologies and fancy machines) or capacity augmentation (more laboratories and technicians) but indeed a large-scale revolution that will result in the emergence of a new industry altogether. This, in turn, can be used for the benefit of not just the but the region at large.