The Uttarakhand High Court has ordered the state government to completely eliminate the revenue police system within a year and transfer its areas of jurisdiction to the regular police force. Uttarakhand is the sole state in India where revenue police operates alongside the regular police force.
Staffed by revenue department officials, revenue police has restricted authority, primarily in remote rural regions of the hill state. Chief Justice Ritu Bahri and Justice Rakesh Kumar Thapliyal of the high court issued this directive on Tuesday during the hearing of a PIL advocating for the abolition of this system.
In 2018, the high court ordered the removal of the long-standing practice of revenue police from the state during a hearing on a dowry death case mishandled by the revenue police.
Similarly, in 2022, a division bench consisting of Chief Justice Vipin Sanghi and Justice RC Khulbe issued similar orders during a PIL hearing. The PIL alleged that if Ankita Bhandari’s murder investigation had been directly handled by regular police instead of revenue police, there wouldn’t have been such significant delays.
In October 2022, the state cabinet passed a resolution to gradually abolish the revenue police system. In 2004, the Supreme Court, in the case of Navin Chandra vs State Government, recognized the necessity to abolish this system, noting that revenue police lack the training and resources of regular police, making it challenging for them to effectively handle crime scenes.
