JOIN USCabinet nod to virtual police stations
Strengthening its counter-terrorism and crime detection mechanism, the Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the revamp of an e-initiative to link police stations across the country by integrating it with a similar project in criminal justice system.
The revamping of Crime and Criminals Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) should be completed by March 2017; the Cabinet set the deadline as it decided to implement the Integrated Criminal Justice System (ICJS) by integrating CCTNS with e-courts, e-prisons, forensics and prosecution.
The project aims to enhance transparency and reduce processing time and aligns with the vision of smart policing and digital India.
According to the plan, a central citizen portal with links to state-level portals will be created under the CCTNS. These portals would provide services like police verification, reporting crime, besides tracking online progress of cases, online reporting of grievances against police officials, accessing victim compensation fund and legal services.
The list of proclaimed offenders, sex offenders, and most-wanted criminals would also be published on this citizen portal, which will help the law-enforcing agencies as well as citizens.
The project will also streamline the criminal justice system by computerising the functioning of police stations, prisons, prosecution directorates, forensic laboratories and ensuring smooth data exchange among these systems. All police stations in the country will be networked and can exchange information on a need basis.
The outlay for the project is Rs 2,000 crore, out of which Rs 878 crore has already been released to the implementation agencies. The outlay includes operation and maintenance phase for additional five years up to March 2022.
The CCTNS had originally started with the objective of interconnecting about 15,000 police stations and 5,000 offices of supervisory police officers across the country besides digitisation of data related to FIRs and charge-sheets.
According to the plan, the police-citizen interface will undergo a major shift. It will give a major boost to the e-governance initiatives in the country, an official statement said.