Criminal tracking system by Sept

Criminal tracking system by Sept

The government will roll out its ambitious crime tracking network by September next year for use by enforcement and police officials to speed up probes and facilitate real-time access of classified criminal data.

The Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System (CCTNS) once fully operational will facilitate collection, storage, retrieval, analysis, transfer and sharing of data and information between police stations, state headquarters and central police organisations.

"The CCTNS will roll out by September 2011. Currently, we are putting in place both the hardware and software at police stations and control rooms so that initial data can be fed onto the systems and the individual database of police agencies and others is uploaded," National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) Director General N K Tripathi told the news agency.

The NCRB is the nodal central agency mandated to implement the mammoth network in all the states in collaboration with other enforcement agencies like the Intelligence Bureau, CBI, Enforcement Directorate and Customs department.

"With the CCTNS coming into being, transparency and real- time analysis of criminals and crime incidents would be possible. The police official or an investigating officer sitting in a police station will be able to upload his case diaries. Such information will be vital for probes with inter-state ramifications," Tripathi said.

The DG said he is currently visiting various states to check the progress of the implementation, while the NCRB is training state police officials and others to operate the new system.

Under the CCTNS project, about 14,000 police stations across the country and 6,000 offices of police department, including scientific and technical organisations, fingerprints and forensic bureaus are expected to be brought under one head by 2012.

The budget outlay for the entire network is Rs 2,000 crore.

Tripathi said the CCTNS will subsequently have a public interface where ordinary citizens can log on to a website and check the antecedents of motor vehicles -both new and stolen - registered countrywide.

Underlining the importance of the CCTNS, Home Minister P Chidambaram had said last year, "The police stations in the country are, today, virtually unconnected islands...There is no system of data storage, data sharing and accessing data. There is no system under which one police station can talk to another directly".

"There is no record of crimes or criminals that can be accessed by a SHO, except the manual records relating to that police station."