After 5 decades, Mumbai court shutters Rs 7.65 theft case

Mumbai: Nearly 50 years after the theft of Rs 7.65, a Mumbai court has finally dropped the curtain on a 1977 cold case involving two unidentified accused and a complainant who remained untraceable despite decades of police searches.

The ruling is one of the many recent verdicts in decades-old cases that have remained in the cold storage, clogging the legal system.

The Mazagaon court closed the 1977 case as part of its endeavour to dispose of old cases, where the accused have either died, remained unidentified or untraceable.

The 1977 theft case involved two unidentified men accused of stealing Rs 7.65, a significant sum five decades ago. However, the duo could not be traced despite non-bailable warrants, which put the matter into cold storage.

Judicial Magistrate First Class (Mazagaon court) Aarti Kulkarni, on January 14, closed the case, noting that the matter was nearly 50 years old and had remained “pending unnecessarily without progress”.

“More than sufficient time is taken. There is no point in keeping the matter pending,” the court said in its order.

It discharged the two accused booked under Section 379 (theft) of the Indian Penal Code, and directed that the stolen sum of Rs 7.65 be returned to the complainant.

“If the informant isn’t found, the amount will be deposited into the government account following the appeal period,” the court stated in the order.

It held that since the stolen amount was under Rs 2,000, the case was classified to be tried summarily under Section 260 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), which allows for “summary trials” for minor offences, including thefts where the value of the property is small, to ensure swift justice.

Similarly, in a 30-year-old case, a magistrate court discharged an accused booked under the Indian Passport Act and Foreigners Act, noting that he had remained untraceable since 1995 when the chargesheet was filed.

A 2003 rash driving case met a similar fate from a magistrate’s court, as a police report confirmed that not only the accused, but the original informant and all witnesses, were no longer traceable.

The accused had been booked under Sections 279 (rash driving) and 338 (causing grievous hurt by an act endangering life or personal safety) under the IPC.

There was no reasonable possibility of finding the accused in the near future, the court said, and held that it would be improper to keep the file open indefinitely.