Database of lakhs of criminals will now be a click away for Gujarat Police as the state Directorate of Forensic Science has taken up an ambitious project to link all police stations across the state, in what is being seen as a watershed project in crime detection.

The pet project of the Home department being implemented for the first time in the country has been launched in Ahmedabad in the first phase and will be implemented in other parts of the state by next year-end, DFS officials said.

"The database of criminals will be a click away for police officials of the state, once this project is complete," Deputy Director of DFS M S Daihya told PTI.

"Through this project police will save a lot of crucial time in obtaining criminal background of the offender, it will be of great help in detection of new crime and also help in updating our data of new criminals online," Daihya said.

"We have started installing 'live scan device' in police stations of Ahmedabad city. This device can scan the finger prints of the criminal caught by the police and transmit it to our server here online where we have stored the database of over four lakh criminals," he said.

"In a few minutes, our server will revert and provide detailed criminal background of the person to the police official," Daihya said.

"If a crime is committed, be it homicide or theft or any other kind of crime, DFS officials go to the spot and collect details including fingerprints. Once the fingerprints are fed to our server we will be able to know who is involved in the crime if he is a repeat offender," DFS Director of finger prints S M Joshi said. .

"After we made available criminal backgrounds of offenders in digitised format, we have solved about 200 cases by pointing out to police in a very short time that such and such person or persons were involved in that particular incidence of crime," Joshi said.

The other great advantage of this project will be that our database of criminals will be constantly updated as first time offenders caught by the police will get recorded automatically when police will send fingerprints of those arrested by them online. We will seek the details of the person if he is proved guilty and update it on our server, Joshi said.

Till now, all these processes were conducted manually and fingerprints were sent to DFS by post to which they used to reply and send the criminal background by post to police stations, he said.

"The earlier process used to consume a lot of time, and by the time the police used to receive information on who were involved in the crime, offenders would have escaped. In case of those arrested, they used to be released on bail as the police would not be able to prosecute them well due to time lost in receiving their background," Joshi said.

"This project will revolutionise detection of crime in the state," he believes.

"We have linked up 12 police stations of Ahmedabad so far and provided them live scan device. All the 36 police stations of the city will be covered by the month end," Joshi said.

"We plan to link up all the police stations of the state by the end of next year," he added.