Bringing policing closer to the people, Assam Police will roll out its ambitious "Citizen Portal" from January 1 as a pilot project by offering a host of services like tenant or staff verification, issue of character certificate and event request.

"We will initially offer only a few services during the pilot launching of the site. The e-services will be available to citizens having internet connections, enabling them to avail the services without having to go to police stations," Assam Additional Director General of Police (Communication) Anil Kumar Jha said.

The portal, which will be launched on Friday and its performance monitored for the first two months, is being developed under Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS) project, he said.

"The site will initially offer services like tenant, domestic help or employee verification, character certificate and requests for protest, strike, procession and organising events. Once the testing is successful, more online services will be opened," Jha said.

The address of the portal is www.assampolice.assam.gov.in and all police stations having an internet connection are connected with the system.

He said that the next step would be to include registration of complaints through the Citizen Portal. "The biggest grievance against police stations that we get from the public is non-registration of complaints. By allowing complaint registration through the Citizen Portal, this bottleneck will go away. Anyone will be able to file a complaint from anywhere and nobody needs to request anyone," Jha said.

In Assam, the CCTNS project implementation has been completed in 312 police stations and 154 offices of higher officials, with continuing digitisation of the FIRs across the state.

"In 2015, around 1.04 lakh FIRs have been registered across the state, of which over 96 per cent cases have already been digitised. The CCTNS system has also integrated the Vahan software with all police stations to directly upload the status of stolen and recovered vehicles," Jha said.

He, however, said 97 police stations were currently working offline as standalone units due to non-availability of internet connectivity as most of them are located in remote areas.