Surendra Koli, earlier convicted in the Nithari killings case, arrested in 2006 and twice close to execution, has been acquitted by the Supreme Court. Behind this lies a shameful story of the failure of the investigative process, the first step in the justice delivery system. The remains of a large number of people, most of them girls, were found in a drain behind a bungalow in Nithari, close to Noida. Mr Koli was accused of 13 murders and his employer, Moninder Singh Pandher, too, was arrested. After a long-drawn out process of appeals and rejections in various courts, 12 of the cases collapsed in the Allahabad High Court in 2023 and Mr Pandher was released. The high court found that the evidence against Mr Koli was inadmissible. His confession, the only direct connection with the crimes, had been apparently given under coercion, the recovery process of the evidence was undocumented and unscientific, and the forensic evidence was flawed and inadequate. So in 2025, in response to a curative petition by
Mr Koli, the Supreme Court acquitted him in the last case in which he had been convicted because on the basis of consistency of the rule of law, it also fell through as it rested on the same evidentiary foundation.
The local police made numerous errors and these were not corrected when the Central Bureau of Investigation took over. The drain was not on Mr Pandher’s land but on common ground. But the CBI did not widen the investigation. From this tragedy of neglect and carelessness, the prosecution could not gather convincing arguments. The result was unfairness, especially to the parents of the victims who lived in the hope of justice and have now been cruelly disappointed. Many of them are from a vulnerable community. All parents had reposed their trust in the justice system. The system has failed them not because it upheld the law but because the police and the CBI had not fulfilled their responsibilities in the course of their investigations. The courts insist that justice is everyone’s right, but in this case every stakeholder has been deprived of it. The Nithari case stands as a stark and shameful example of a system in which too often than not perpetrators are allowed to go free because the investigators
have slipped up on gathering evidence that is crucial for nailing the accused.