The Supreme Court on May 2 initiated a suo motu case over courts in Odisha ordering accused persons to clean police stations as a condition for bail.

While recent reports would indicate that such orders were unique to the anti-mining protestors' cases, Bar & Bench has found that one judge of the Orissa High Court has passed at least fifty such orders.

Between April and September 2025, Justice SK Panigrahi of the Orissa High Court passed at least 50 orders with directions to clean police stations, temples, hospitals, village roads, local ponds and even a bank in one instance.

Pertinently, from the records available on e-courts, no other judge of the High Court seems to have passed bail orders with such conditions.

Justice Panigrahi passed these directions in orders granting bail in a variety of cases from theft to murder. Every order clearly stated the time at which the accused would have to perform the "cleaning" duties, usually for 2-3 hours between 6 and 10 am. The orders also specified the period for which bail condition would operate, usually between 1 to 3 months.

Apart from the fact that there is no statutory provision to impose such conditions while granting bail, there seems to be no uniform proportionality between the crime and punishment in these orders.

Murder accused and theft accused are given the same community service order, albeit after undergoing different periods of incarceration.

However, in some cases, there is an evident connection between the alleged crime and the direction. Persons who were accused of stealing from temples were ordered to clean the same temples for a specific period of time. A person accused of unnatural sex with a calf was ordered to clean the village road and also collect and dump cow dung at a specific location every day for a month.

In one case, a woman accused of cheating and failure to repay several loans was ordered to clean the premises of the concerned ICICI bank branch for two months. This is the only case where the condition was later deleted after the accused informed the court of spinal issues that prevented her from spending long hours bending over to clean floors.

11 orders directed accused released on bail to clean the premises of hospitals or health centres.

However, most such orders passed were to clean police stations. Out of the 50 orders we analysed, Justice Panigrahi directed the accused persons to clean police stations 32 times.

One such order was issued on the bail application filed by an anti-mining protestor, Kumeswar Naik, who was slapped with several charges including rioting and even attempt to murder.

Justice Patnaik granted bail to Naik after he had spent just over 3 months behind bars. As a condition for granting bail, apart from the usual directions to refrain from influencing witnesses and tampering with evidence, the Court directed Naik to clean the premises of the Kasipur police station between 6 and 9 am for two months from the date of his release from jail.

A recent report by Article 14 highlighted 8 such orders - 7 passed by district courts and 1 passed by the Orissa High Court in the case of Naik- imposing such conditions while granting bail to persons involved in anti-mining protests in the State. Many of the accused persons are from Dalit and Adivasi communities.

Legal experts have questioned the propriety of imposing such bail conditions and social activists have pointed out the appearance of a caste bias in such orders.

The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) recognises “community service” as a distinct form of punishment for certain offences, but it is strictly in the nature of a penal provision to be imposed on convicted persons, not as a bail condition. The same was made clear by the Kerala High Court in a June 2025 verdict where it was observed that community service as defined under Section 4(f) of the BNS is a punishment to be awarded in appropriate cases and cannot be imposed as a bail condition.

Indeed, even the Supreme Court has frowned upon the practice of imposing out-of-the-box, disconnected conditions to grant bail.

Read list of the 50 cases in which similar directions were passed.