Buxar e-Malkhana: Until recently, if there was one thing every officer in Bihar’s Buxar district dreaded, it was malkhanas, or evidence rooms. Dusty and cluttered, they overflowed with decades of collected evidence – from seized firearms and narcotics to grimy cars – making them a record keeper’s nightmare.
That is now changing, thanks to one IPS officer – Buxar Superintendent of Police (SP) Shubham Arya. Under him, the Buxar Police has launched ‘e-Malkhana’, a filing system designed to overhaul these rooms by ensuring all evidence is systematically fed into software to facilitate faster tracking.
Introduced in July, the e-Malkhana ensures that “evidence is never again lost due to poor storage or record-keeping”, says Arya.
Buxar is the first district in Bihar to roll out such a filing system.
“Evidence is the backbone of the criminal justice system, and with them lost or delayed, justice suffers,” Arya, a 2019-batch IPS officer, tells The Indian Express. “Earlier, officers would avoid taking charge of the malkhana because there was no clear system in place. If something goes missing, an officer would be summoned, even if it means calling them after retirement.”
For a state that typically outsources such digitisation to IT firms, the initiative is unique in another respect: the software has been created by the police.
“The Bihar Police has continuously been making technological advancements. So, we created the software ourselves in two months — no external vendors, no big budgets, just a small team from within the force,” Arya says.
The Herculean task
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For most officers, Buxar’s malkhanas were an administrative black hole – piles of evidence that were hard to track and often rendered unrecognisable by age.
Typically, all evidence stored in these rooms is “property of the court,” meaning it remains in the malkhana until the court calls for it. Such evidence is usually destroyed or forfeited after trial, depending on the court’s ruling, but larger seizures — such as cars — are difficult to dispose of and often remain in police stations even after cases are closed due to lack of proper documentation of records. As a result, evidence keeps piling up, making it prone to loss or tampering.
“Every year, police stations handle hundreds of case properties that are retained until court verdicts. But prolonged time makes them vulnerable to loss,” Arya says.
Lost or missing evidence prolongs court trials, feeding the vicious cycle.
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“If things go awry, the blame lingers endlessly, and missing items can delay court proceedings, complicate disposals, or even result in acquittals,” the officer says.
Sometimes, this “missing” evidence spawns strange cases, such as when the Bihar Police blamed rats for guzzling down several litres of impounded alcohol in 2017.
Piling evidence also complicates other aspects of police functioning, such as transfers and handovers, even leading to officers being summoned out of retirement “because a weapon or a vehicle they had once overseen has gone missing”.
“When a case officer or the malkhana in-charge gets transferred, the handover could take months,” says Arya. “Officers would often delay joining their new posts — some even took leave — just to complete the physical tally of items.”
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Says a police officer at Buxar’s Dhansoi Police Station: “When you were transferred to the malkhana, it felt like a curse. Everything was in disarray. Some cases drag on for years, and you were left with piles of things you couldn’t find when you needed them.”
Digitisation of malkhanas was one of Arya’s earliest projects soon after he took over in September last year. For this, Arya, an engineering graduate, took inspiration from the Delhi Police.
“During training, I’d heard of similar efforts by the Delhi Police,” he says.
Even before he started, however, Arya knew the magnitude of the task, especially given the district police’s limited resources. Still, he set about his work in summer this year, gathering a team of around four people with technical backgrounds from within the district police department to help develop the software.
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The project was first rolled out in six of Vicar’s 24 police stations, with plans to extend it to others soon.
Under the new system, evidence at various police stations is photographed, barcoded and entered into the system. Small items are stored in numbered plastic boxes and cards, while large ones — such as vehicles — are reorganised and tabulated. The project initially began with six police stations of Buxar’s 24 police stations and will soon extend to other police stations.
“Before, tracing evidence was difficult — sometimes impossible — without a proper chain of custody. Now, with just a click, one can know exactly where each item is — in which box, on which shelf, in which room, and under whose custody,” he says.
The impact goes beyond tidier shelves — it saves hours of manual work.
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“Earlier, before every court hearing, officers would manually search through piles of items, often turning the room upside down,” Arya says, adding that the new system will allow vehicles to be auctioned swiftly after cases are disposed of.
Meanwhile, the department is already working on a major system update – mandatory thumb impression whenever evidence is deposited, withdrawn, or moved.
“This will make the entire chain of custody traceable and make the audit trail tamper-proof, leaving no room for denial,” he says.
