Come December 15, the antecedents of a criminal from West Bengal can be traced easily by the Ahmedabad police. Similarly, the fingerprints of an accused in Haryana can be matched by sitting in a small station in Andhra Pradesh.
Thanks to the advent of Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System (CCTNS), policing will henceforth be more people-friendly and less of a drudgery for police personnel. One of the 27 components of the Union government's e-governance project, this module dedicated to the Police Department, is being developed to make law enforcement and crime control easy.
Software to be fine-tuned
The Core Application Software (CAS), which is now under testing for close to a month in Uttar Pradesh, Kerala and Assam, will be fine-tuned and launched across the country by December 15. All the 15,000 and odd police stations coming under the network will go hi-tech with computers, switches, modems and routers. What is more, the software allows transliteration of the case details into Hindi or any regional language, thus getting a pan-Indian look.
States such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Goa and Gujarat already have their own advanced applications and they will be integrated with the CAS.
“If an investigating officer gives details of an accused, say the approximate age, skin colour and the language spoken, the search can be narrowed down to match the parameters. Similarly, the central server at our headquarters compares the fingerprints with lakh of records available,” N.K. Tripathi, Director-General of the National Crime Records Bureau, New Delhi, told The Hindu . The reduction of paper work would facilitate easy access to records, and protect them from fire, weather and attempts of deliberate destruction.
A mouse-click away
“While the investigating officers will be able to access information at the click of the mouse, supervisory officials can take informed decisions by drawing the right inferences.”
What does it mean to the common man? The system would allow lodging of online complaints, checking for case details periodically and monitoring of progress.
Accompanied by Superintendent of Police (Tirupati Urban), J. Prabhakara Rao, Mr. Tripathi checked the file management system in vogue at SV University campus police station.
