- (1.) THE prayer of the petitioner, who happens to be an Assistant of this Court, is to quash the first informa tion report dated 1-3-1978 lodged by the Registrar of this Court which has given rise to registration of case crime No. 31 of 1978 under Sections 420, 511, 467, 463, 471, 120-B, IPC, P. S. Cantt, Town and District Allahabad as contained in Annexure-1.
(2.) ANNEXURE-1 is not a certified copy of the alleged first information report. The document appended as ANNEXURE-I is not in the form prescribed or complete. It ap pears to be merely an extract, the relevant part of which reads thus: "from Sri B. C. Jauhary Registrar High Court, Allahabad To, The Sr. Supdt. of Police Allahabad. No- 395/accounts (A) Section dated Alld. 1-3-1978 Sir, This is to inform you that Sri Sheo Prakash Srivastava is an assistant in the Ac counts Deptt. of High Court. He is entrusted with the special work of preparing a/cs bills, on 17-2-78, he prepared a forged bill No. 1604 for the amount of Rs. 30,500/- in the names of 5 persons, namely S/sri A. P. Singh, B. P. Singh, P. N. Sharma, K. P. Dubey and R. R. Srivastava as arrears of pay for the period from 1-3-77 to 31-1-79. Those persons are not in the service of the court itself. He got the bill countersigned by S. O. in a routine manner and finally by the Dy. Registrar. After that he got it passed by the Treasury Accounts and the bill sent to State Bank, Sub-branch, High Court for collection through Sri R. N. Sinha Cashier. In the mean time in the routine checking on 24-2-78, Sri Hanuman Prasad Agarwal, an assistant in the accounts department found that the bill is a forged one and immediately informed the Dy. Registrar Sri V. N. Mehrotra about the same. In turn the Dy. Registrar Sri V. N. Mehrotra in formed the State Bank to stop the payment of bill No. 1604 and the Bank did not cash the bill on information received. Sri Sheo Prakash Srivastava this commited forgery, cheating and conspiracy, which, but for the timely checking would have been mis appropriated. Suitable action may therefore immediately be taken for the above offence against Sri Sheo Prakash Srivastava. Sd/- B. C. Jauhari Registrar. " From the record it appears that a charge-sheet was submitted against the petitioner after investigation which, how ever, has either been weeded out or was burnt in a fire. Accoridng to Sri Upadhyay, learned counsel for the petitioner, no charge-sheet was ever submitted and that the petitioner who has a fundamental right of having a speedy trial is being harassed by the dila tory attitude of the investigating agency.
(3.) THE question before us, however, is as to wehther a cognizable offence has been made out against the petitioner in the impugned first information report or not and whether the same is liable to be quashed by us in exercise of our discre tionary jurisdiction. The facts stated as above in the first information report shows commission of cognizable offences by the petitioner, Thus, there is no question of quashing the first information report.;