Rahima Khatun died after drinking milk allegedly poisoned by her in-laws. Though the incident happened a year ago, police are yet to file a chargesheet against Rahima’s in-laws, who are out on bail.

Asish Banerjee’s software engineer son Souvik died in a road accident more than a year back. The 60-year-old father is yet to receive his son’s insurance claim.

In both cases, the final post-mortem report has not been prepared because the cops are yet to receive the viscera reports from the state forensic science laboratory.

Test reports of over 2,500 samples of viscera — organs such as heart, lungs and stomach — are pending with the forensic lab. As a result, cases have been piling up with the police for the past three years.

The state forensic lab, the oldest such facility in the country, has neither enough manpower nor adequate infrastructure. This is creating a hurdle in disposal of criminal cases.

Employees of the Belgachhia laboratory doubt whether the situation would improve. “More than 3,000 samples come in every year and there is an equal amount of backlog. The department’s reduced manpower is telling on our output,” said a laboratory official.

The laboratory is the only testing facility in the state, where samples of viscera from 19 districts are sent by police for examination. “The regional forensic laboratory in north Bengal does not have viscera testing facilities. So we have to examine the samples received by the north Bengal centre, too,” the official added.

Sources pointed out that poor pay was a stumbling block in filling up vacant posts in the department. “We had published advertisements for some of the seats but the response was lukeworm,” said an official.

Apart from the acute shortage of skilled forensic staff, the lack of infrastructure is a major problem. “We need a special type of boiler to dry the viscera samples before examination. Since we don’t have the boiler we have to dry the samples manually, which takes more time, delaying the examination process,” an official explained.

There are other problems too. “A few years ago, we would test for 10 to 12 kinds of poison. But now nearly 250 varieties of poison are in use. So, more sophisticated infrastructure is needed to examine cases of poisoning,” said another official.