The Chandigarh police will roll out crime and criminal tracking network and systems (CCTNS) project, which aims to facilitate information sharing among police stations and higher police offices across the country, before June next year.

All of the 11 police stations have been provided with 2Mbps leased line connectivity by BSNL and have been integrated with a data centre. The core application software (CAS) has already been installed in all police stations.

The digitisation, under CCTNS, of records of past 10 years is in advanced stages. According to police officials, the records which were digitised during previous modernisation projects including CIPA (common integrated police application) and CCIS (criminal and crime information system), have been migrated to CCTNS. However, officials are filling up the additional information required by CAS which will be over in next two months.

Once implemented, a set of services including verifications, permits and licenses will also be offered through a citizen portal, which is expected to be launched this month. “Servant and tenant verification and character certificate are issued by the Chandigarh police. Verification for passport and permission for loudspeaker are among services wherein the field work is done by the Chandigarh police but the issuing authority is the administration. The portal will be a single window for all these services,” a senior police official said.

The project automates the workflow of crime investigation, which includes general dairy entry, filling of an FIR, crime detail, arrest and surrender, property seizure, final form (charge sheet or case closure report), court disposal (conviction or acquittal) and result of appeal. These are called seven integrated investigation forms in the cop vocabulary.

At police station, once the data is fed in to the system, which is integrated with NIC data centre, which in turn is connected with national data centre located in Delhi, the same will be available for reference for other police stations by the software. The automation will eliminate the need to maintain 25 different types of registers manually, although this will be done in phases.

As a result, it will become easy for a cop to know whether certain modus operandi employed in one case has been used in other. The system will help cops to ascertain whether suspects have a criminal background.

At present the process of ascertaining the veracity of identification, residence and family details of a suspect is an extremely difficult task. If a suspect in police custody belongs to a different state, it becomes difficult to verify claims made by him/her. Usually, cops post enquiry letters to their counterparts in other states.

But the queries are rarely answered. The logistics and limited man power also do not allow the police to send a cop for verification in other states. Under CCTNS, an alert will be issued to the concerned SHO of the police station, who will then mark it to an investigation officer. As the backlog of cases under every IO and other police officials are now easily accessible to senior cops, police officials believe that the pending queries will be answered.

The project will also eliminate the chances for records manipulation by the police. Once an FIR or any of the five forms (last two forms are filled by court personnel)is punched in to the system, they can’t be altered.

The database will also help the police in tracing the missing persons and in dentifying dead bodies.

The project is worth Rs 7.49 crore and is being implemented by Vyom Technologies. Out of the selected 1210 cops for capacity building under CCTNS, 938 cops have already received training.

The total strength of Chandigarh police is 6000. The rest of the staff is being provided basic IT training. The police will soon come up with a tender on automatic finger print identification system (AFIS), a project to capture fingerprints of all suspects and prisoners. The project will be worth Rs 4crore, said police officials.

There is also a plan to integrate their database with UIDAI, which would help in sharing the demographic data of the suspects, the police official said.