CBI to focus on human trafficking and economic offences: Director

After focusing on corruption cases for long, CBI today said it was redefining its role, giving importance to issues like human trafficking and economic offences.

"This year we are going to make a concerted effort to focus our attention to redefine our role in areas of inter-state and international economic crimes," CBI director Ashwini Kumar said here.

CBI had decided to focus on the areas which are directly relevant to public at large, he said after inaugurating a workshop sponsored by the agency for media professionals.

Saying that CBI has identified areas of crimes which impact the common people, he said issues like sale of spurious drugs and substandard medicines, adulteration of food and corruption in health and education sectors will be key areas.

"Another key area of our work will be to launch a campaign against human trafficking of women and children. These crimes have been our responsibility since long but we gave more attention to corruption," he said.

The agency was into innovation as a continuous process in areas of DNA finger-printing techniques, voice recognition, algorithms for fast database research, he said adding "we are also upgrading our skills through constant training."

He said while the agency was quick with investigation of cases, "our weakness is prosecution and court trial" as it sometimes stretched for years.

However, realising the need for more CBI courts and reducing pendency, the Centre has taken up matter of setting up of 71 exclusive courts across the country with the prime minister taking up the matter with chief ministers, the CBI chief  said.

He also said CBI's workforce was around 5,000 personnel only, adding, they may be over burdened with increasing dependency on the agency, resulting in quality going down.

Kumar said the agency would request the government to increase its strength if the present trend continued.