Hyderabad: Telangana has found itself in the top 3 positions for implementing the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS), which records all details of the criminals, including their mobility.
The CCTNS project, known as the Common Integrated Police Application (CIPA), was introduced in 2004 with an aim to digitise instances of crime and criminal records at the police station level. It later resulted in conceptualisation of a system, which would entail linkages between police stations across the country for aiding investigations and providing citizen-centric services.
Speaking about the project Hyderabad’s police Commissioner Anjani Kumar on Twitter said, “CCTNS the acronym for Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems in India, is a project worth more than ₹5000 crore project that had seen the participation of all the states of India. You will be happy to know that Telangana police and Hyderabad city has been a pioneer in this. If you go through the Ministry of Home Affairs website in the last two years Hyderabad city police Telangana state has been always in the top three.”
Explaining more about the project the Commissioner said, “This is nothing but networking of police stations within the state and connecting them to each and every police station of the country. If there is an FIR in a deep a desert of Rajasthan and if they have some link from Hyderabad we can immediately know on our monitor, this is the benefit of CCTNS.”
Anjani also said that the police would easily know all the details of any criminal right from fingerprints to his or her personal or professional friend. By now more than forty lakh fingerprints of people who have been convicted for various crimes is made accessible by this. “We will know how many are in the jail, and how many are coming out. Who are their professional friends and personal friends, everything is available,” he added.
Moreover, the movement of criminals from one state to another can also be tracked by this system. The data released by the Ministry of Home Affairs in January 2019, stated that 14,724 police stations out of 15,705 police stations (approximately 94 per cent) have been able to enter the First Information Report (FIR) on CCTNS software.
However, the cost of the project quoted by Anjani was ₹5,000 crore, while the official website says ₹2,000 crores.