Lok Sabha

missing

Sanjay Kumar

Sunil Ramanand

Come March 2016 and people all over the country will be able to lodge online police complaints from anywhere with just a click of the mouse. The police department will be providing various other online services as well, so that people can track the status of their applications without having to make umpteen rounds of the police stations. For, paperwork has been replaced by networked computers.On Tuesday, minister of state for home affairs Kiren Rijiju had informed theabout the launch of the Central Citizen Portal (CCP) — a key component of the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) project — which would provide online facilities for reporting crime, cybercrime cases,persons, loss of property, passport verification and so on. The CCP is expected to be operational by the end of March 2016. “This will create a facility for people to report a crime and also track the follow-up action taken by the appropriate agencies,” added Union home minister Rajnath Singh.The CCTNS, which links all the police stations in the country, has already become functional in many states. Approximately, 71 per cent (more than 10,000) police stations in the country have started using the software developed under the CCTNS for the registration of first information reports (FIRs). Internet connections using Virtual Private Network (VPN) over broadband have also been provided to more than 80 per cent police stations and higher police offices. Cops claim that CCTNS will help a great deal in knowing details of criminals., the CID chief and CCTNS nodal officer in the state, told Mirror, “We are in the advanced stage of CCTNS implementation in Maharashtra. The next step is the launch of CCP, which will happen soon. The CCTNS makes police functioning citizen- friendly and more transparent by automating the functioning of police stations.”Pune rural SP Dr Jay Jadhav said, “Now, everything is being fed into the computer systems at police stations. Earlier, all information related to crimes and criminal justice was generally maintained in the physical form. This had its own limitations, especially with regard to sharing data among police stations, districts and states. The CCTNS will make that easy.”Even Pune police joint commissionerwas all praise for the new system. “The CCTNS will make police work efficiently. We are already uploading details as well as filling various forms online. With this, the citizens will get various services without having to physically go to police stations,” he shared.The extended project also proposes to integrate with e-court and e-prison applications to improve the efficiency of the criminal justice system in the country. After extension, the CCTNS project is expected to be fully operational by March 2017.