Ketan Agarwal murder case: What is gait analysis and why are police using it?

While the Pune police have arrested both Siya Goyal and her alleged lover Chetan Chaudhary for the alleged murder of her fiance, realtor Ketan Agarwal, they have a crucial task at hand—prove the duo's involvement in the crime beyond doubt in court.

Investigators have already reconstructed the crime scene twice, once with Siya (20), during which a dummy was pushed off the cliff to recreate the fatal moment, and separately with Chetan (22), to retrace the route he allegedly took while trailing the couple.

While CCTV cameras near Lohagad Fort captured a hooded figure in shorts trailing Ketan (26) and Siya during the June 18 trek that turned fatal for the former, but the face is largely hidden. Therefore, standard facial recognition has offered investigators little to work with.

While the figure is claimed to be Chetan, police are in the process of reinforcing the claims with stronger evidence. They are now using gait analysis to make a stronger case against Chetan.

What is gait analysis?

Gait analysis is a forensic technique built around the idea that the way a person walks —their posture, stride length, limb swing, and overall body mechanics—is almost as individual as a fingerprint, and far harder to disguise than a face.

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To use it here, police plan to have Chetan wear clothing similar to what was seen in the CCTV visuals and walk the same stretch of the trek route. This recreated footage will then be compared frame by frame against the original recording, with forensic experts looking for matching patterns in stride and movement rather than facial features.

How the science works and its limits

According to a report in NDTV, IPS officer Mayank Gurjar, who led the special investigation team in the Mukesh Chandrakar murder case in Chhattisgarh, has claimed that a person's walk is shaped by their skeletal structure and biomechanics, traits that tend to remain consistent even when a suspect tries to hide their identity.

If experts find a genuine match between Chaudhary's recreated walk and the CCTV footage, it could meaningfully strengthen the circumstantial evidence by placing him at the scene.

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However, Gurjar and other experts are careful to flag that gait analysis is corroborative, not conclusive. It cannot establish guilt on its own and needs to be read alongside other forensic findings, digital evidence and witness accounts.

Global precedent

Gait analysis is not new to policing. British forces have used it in homicide, robbery and sexual assault investigations where footage was too blurry or suspects had concealed their faces, and it was famously deployed to identify participants in the 2011 London riots.

China has gone further, folding AI-driven gait recognition into its broader surveillance infrastructure. In India, though, forensic video analysis of this kind is still relatively new, and cybersecurity experts say the Pune case could become one of the most closely watched applications of the technique so far.

Meanwhile, investigators are also probing whether crucial data was wiped from Ketan's phone after his death, since the device is believed to have stayed with Siya for some time before it reached his family.

On June 18, Ketan was allegedly pushed off a cliff at Lohagad Fort during a trek with Siya. The couple was set to marry in November. Police have reasons to believe that Siya and Chetan conspired to kill Ketan and pushed him off the cliff. Both are currently in police custody.