I n Ju­ly 2021, Jus­tice JR Mid­ha, who served as a judge in In­dia, dur­ing his re­tire­ment cer­e­mo­ny, stat­ed, “In a court of jus­tice, both the par­ties know the truth, it is the judge who is on tri­al.”

This is ab­solute­ly true of the jus­tice sys­tem. Par­ties ap­proach the court for var­i­ous dis­putes or charges, with the par­ties know­ing the truth of their mat­ters, but ma­nip­u­lat­ing that truth to se­cure the out­come which they need. The out­come be­ing ei­ther a de­c­la­ra­tion of “not guilty” or or­der for the pay­ment of mon­ey, trans­fer of land or any such is­sue. The suc­cess or fail­ure of a case is not nec­es­sar­i­ly de­ter­mined by the truth of the dis­pute, but rather by what the ev­i­dence is able to prove.

Judges car­ry the heavy bur­den of analysing ev­i­dence, plac­ing weight on what has been pre­sent­ed, de­ter­min­ing whether lit­i­gants are be­ing truth­ful and fi­nal­ly de­liv­er­ing a de­ci­sion based on the facts, doc­u­ments and oth­er in­for­ma­tion pre­sent­ed to them and test­ed in cross-ex­am­i­na­tion.

There­fore, ev­i­dence is the pil­lar by which a lit­i­gant can prove their case be­fore the court. Ev­i­dence is pre­sent­ed through doc­u­men­ta­tion, state­ments from wit­ness­es, pho­tographs, videos or any such avail­able ma­te­r­i­al which can as­sist the court in de­ter­min­ing the salient facts.

There are per­sons who ei­ther do not ap­pre­ci­ate the need for ev­i­dence or sim­ply take for grant­ed the need to se­cure ev­i­dence to sup­port con­tentions be­fore the court. We can some­times be di­vid­ed in­to two groups: the ones who metic­u­lous­ly file away bills, re­ceipts, con­tracts, doc­u­ments, emails, mes­sages and even pho­tographs. There is al­so the oth­er group, which, while clean­ing, sim­ply delete, throw away or de­stroy doc­u­ments which they be­lieve they would nev­er need in the fu­ture. I un­der­stand a layper­son not ap­pre­ci­at­ing the need for ev­i­dence and sim­ply not sav­ing or be­ing par­tic­u­lar with doc­u­ments.

Here is my con­cern. Our po­lice of­fi­cers are trained (at least I be­lieve they are) in gath­er­ing ev­i­dence, se­cur­ing a prop­er ev­i­dence trail, whether it be through pho­tographs, state­ments, re­ports, analy­sis and oth­er forms of ev­i­dence re­quired to build any case to be tried be­fore the court. In fact, po­lice of­fi­cers are usu­al­ly trained to ap­pre­ci­ate, un­der­stand and main­tain a chain of cus­tody when it comes to ev­i­dence to be pre­sent­ed be­fore the court. They should un­der­stand the need to present ev­i­dence and prove the ev­i­dence was prop­er­ly col­lect­ed, stored and hand­ed over with­out the like­li­hood of be­ing tam­pered with.

Giv­en the im­mense train­ing our po­lice of­fi­cers should have in han­dling ev­i­dence, I am amazed that on po­lice re­ceipts, we still write one word: “In­for­ma­tion.” Po­lice of­fi­cers who are work­ing at the desk should be able to ap­pre­ci­ate and un­der­stand that when mem­bers of the pub­lic make a po­lice re­port and they have not re­ceived any re­lief, then the log­i­cal next step is fil­ing an ac­tion be­fore the courts. Whether that ac­tion may be a do­mes­tic vi­o­lence is­sue or land or ha­rass­ment.

When a client ap­proach­es me to file an ap­pli­ca­tion in court and sits with me for an hour ex­plain­ing in de­tail their con­cern, the next step is to re­view the ev­i­dence which they have brought with them. Imag­ine a client ad­vis­ing me of count­less in­stances of abuse at the hands of their spouse and hav­ing had to make sev­er­al po­lice re­ports and then de­liv­er­ing to me a bunch of po­lice re­ceipts that sim­ply says “In­for­ma­tion.”

That in­for­ma­tion can be any­thing un­der the sun. Per­haps, your neigh­bour was play­ing mu­sic late at night and dis­turb­ing the peace and you filed a re­port. What if they had ar­gued with a rel­a­tive over a land mat­ter? How am I or any oth­er per­son sup­posed to de­ter­mine what “In­for­ma­tion” means?

A pru­dent at­tor­ney at law, while cross-ex­am­in­ing dur­ing a tri­al, may very well be able to prove that the po­lice re­port be­ing re­lied on car­ried no weight, as no one could tru­ly de­ter­mine what was re­port­ed.

To de­ter­mine what in­for­ma­tion was ac­tu­al­ly giv­en to the po­lice of­fi­cers, an at­tor­ney will be con­strained to is­sue a let­ter to the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice re­quest­ing that a copy of the re­port made by their client be dis­closed to them. I am un­cer­tain how long this pro­ce­dure would be, or the wait­ing time for a re­sponse. One would have to be hope­ful that any re­port filed by the po­lice of­fi­cers would be ac­cu­rate, would have been prop­er­ly filed and would be avail­able for dis­clo­sure.

The ques­tion, though, must be asked: how much more en­er­gy would it take to sim­ply add a few ad­di­tion­al words on­to a po­lice re­ceipt? For in­stance, in­stead of sim­ply in­for­ma­tion, we can add “phys­i­cal/ver­bal abuse by spouse” or tres­pass to lands by (per­son named) or loud mu­sic/dis­turb­ing the peace by (per­son named). Yes, I ap­pre­ci­ate that po­lice of­fi­cers may be­lieve that hav­ing to write more words on a po­lice re­port is es­pe­cial­ly oner­ous on them and their work­load, but these per­sons should ap­pre­ci­ate the need for clear­er ev­i­dence, par­tic­u­lar­ly in a world where “in­for­ma­tion” can mean any­thing, every­thing and noth­ing.

Sev­er­al years ago, it was un­think­able that one could make a po­lice re­port and ac­tu­al­ly se­cure a re­ceipt to prove that some type of re­port was ac­tu­al­ly made to the po­lice. Yet, here we are in 2026, where al­most every­one knows they should re­ceive a po­lice re­ceipt once a re­port has been made. It is time we evolve fur­ther and not sim­ply is­sue a re­ceipt be­cause it is re­quired, but take care in record­ing in­for­ma­tion on the re­ceipt with the un­der­stand­ing that the re­ceipt will be used as ev­i­dence be­fore the courts.

Pavi­t­ra Ramharack is Head of Cham­bers at Pavi­t­ra Ramharack At­tor­neys at Law and can be reached at ramharack_pavi­t­ra@out­look.com