The government wants the law commission to study regulations related to postmortem examination.
The Centre wants the Law Commission to study regulations related to postmortem examination which have become outdated and come up with a comprehensive report suggesting necessary amendments.
The move comes after an 82-page report was submitted recently to the Prime Minister and Union Home Minister by the Clinical Forensic Medicine Unit of the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences in Maharashtra.
According to the lead author of the report, Dr Indrajit Khandekar, the PMO had earlier asked the Law Commission to study all aspects of rules related to postmortem examination in the country and suggest changes in various regulations like the Code of Criminal Procedure, Indian Evidence Act and others related to autopsies in the country.
Dr Khandekar points out in his report that since 1898, doctors in India have been following the Criminal Procedure Code provision 174, originally written by the then British government, which is now completely outdated.
"Even after over 100 years, there has not been a single amendment in the law that would help to check the existing pitiable quality of medico-legal death investigation by police and the horrendous quality of postmortem examination in the country," Dr Khandekar writes in the report.
According to the report not amending existing laws has led to unscientific and improper autopsy procedures which result in incomplete postmortem reports. Such reports are partly to blame for the low rates of conviction in courts. The report also points out that the existing rules make the process of collecting postmortem reports very difficult and cumbersome.