The State police have introduced an online ‘Police Verification Service’. Through this, citizens and private companies can apply for employment, tenant or domestic help verification certificates on the Tamil Nadu Police website.
In Chennai, City Police Commissioner A.K.Viswanathan formally launched the online service in the presence of State Crime Records Bureau chief and ADGP Seema Agarwal and other police officers. She said the aim of the new service would be to verify the identity of the person, his/her current address and to check if he/she has any prior criminal cases in the police records.
‘Only for State’
“This service is applicable only for verifying persons who are residing in Tamil Nadu. The police verification will be completed within 15 days from the date the application is received. This service completely dispenses with the need for the applicants to visit a police station,” Ms. Agarwal said.
Mr. Viswanathan said the new system was foolproof and citizen-centric. He said the police had received 2,27,698 applications for verification for issuing passports in 2018. Of them, only 505 applications were pending while others had been disposed of.
The government has fixed a charge of ₹500 per application for individuals and ₹1,000 per application for private companies/institutions. The applicants can pay online using credit or debit cards and through net banking.
Consent letter
The applicant would be able to download the police verification report (PVR) from the website or have a copy of it sent to thethe registered e-mail ID. They can also track the application’s status. The consent letter of the person to be verified is mandatory for applying, except in cases of ‘self-verification’. This has been implemented to prevent frivolous applications.
Ms. Agarwal said the current website for complaints has received 1.37 crore hits since its inception in 2013. As many as 3.32 lakh online complaints have been received and disposed of since then. From 2016, over 5.5 lakh persons viewed FIRs on the website and over 1.5 lakh summons were sent through the SMS service.
