AURANGABAD: Investigating officers, witnesses and 'panch' in Aurangabad range will soon receive court summonses relating to a case on their mobile phones.Inspector general of police (Aurangabad range) Milind Bharambe said the service, the first-of-its-kind in the country, will start on Monday. The text messages will be sent through an application. So far, 3,700 e-summonses have already been served on a trial basis, he said. “Considering that not all mobile phones have an internet connection, we have decided to send summonses via text messages and the delivery report received would be a proof of serving of the summons,” Bharambe said.Officers said e-summonses would not only speed up trials that often drag on because of delay in serving them, but also save the police department considerable manpower, fuel and man-hours. On an average, about 10,000 summonses are issued in Aurangabad city annually and another 15,000 in Aurangabad, Jalna, Osmanabad and Beed districts.In the run-up to the launch, all superintendents of police in the range have submitted the names and contact numbers of the policemen in their units to the team at the headquarters. In case of witnesses and ‘panchs’, the area police stations have been tasked with compiling their contact numbers. On collecting the summons from the court, a policeman at the unit headquarters will call the person and check his credentials before sending him an e-summons through text message. After serving the e-summons, the hash value of the received report of the text message would act as an acknowledgement.The policeman will also call the person once again to confirm the receipt of the e-summons. The entire data will be sent online to the court, which wil enable it to schedule the listings accordingly. In addition to this, a day prior to the date of hearing, a reminder call will be made to the people concerned. “Traditionally, at least three to four policemen at each police station will be tied up with summons-related duties. Now, the summons will be served digitally from the respective police headquarters,” said Bharambe. He add that less than five people posted at the headquarters will serve the summonses and collect acknowledgements of the received summonses. This will free up to 40 constables in Aurangabad city for policing work.

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