Report finds gaps in State’s criminal tracking network

he Maharashtra government’s ambitious Crime Criminal Tracking Network System (CCTNS) has not delivered substantial results or better conviction rates, an internal government report has found.

While a lot of effort has gone into setting up the system, which promised to connect all police stations in the State to facilitate sharing of information on criminals and crimes, it has not resulted in improvements in the detection and conviction rates, and collection of evidence, the report has said. Supported by the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the CCTNS is the first-of-its-kind mechanism for sharing of vital information.

The report recommends immediately putting in place a task force headed by Special Inspector General, Cyber, to take corrective steps. The report has also recommended some immediate measures for this task force, such as putting in place a database of all accused and first information reports (FIRs). “Any police station should be able to watch and obtain in a simple manner (a) linkage between the accused in the FIR filed with information/crimes on the same accused pending in other police stations,” the report reads.

The report also says that the system be made capable of aggregating and categorising registered crimes, and deriving trends even at the district level, a feature it currently does not have. Once the trend is identified, the system should be able to raise an alarm for deployment of force in vulnerable regions. “While this may be possible in the current set-up, it is not structured as it is at the Government of India level,” the report reads.

Senior officials said since the CCTNS was started in September 2015, as many as 1,080 police stations have been connected. “Since January 1, 2016, all the police stations in the State have been registering FIRs digitally, making the system database retrievable. In future, we plan to make the system available to the public as well,” said a senior police official.

The report said the CCTNS has not improved detection and conviction rates, and evidence collection