The Ministry of Home Affairs’ flagship programme , which will interconnect all the police stations in the country, will become operational on December 25.
The Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) will facilitate collection, storage, analysis, transfer and sharing of data of crime and criminals’ and information among police stations, state headquarters and central police organisations. The programme, the brainchild of former Home Minister P Chidambaram, will make the manual records obsolete and facilitate smooth communication between police stations. The project will also help crack inter-state cases which often remain a puzzle for investigators.
“It is anticipated that a number of problems will come up during the ‘Go-Live’ and the state nodal officers will display the dynamism and leadership necessary to resolve all such issues. However, it is also necessary that some monitoring of the activities is done centrally to ensure that they are time-bound and objectives of the ‘Go-Live’ of the CCTNS project are met,” a communiqué from the ministry said. The missive also said some last-minute glitches may be encountered, owing to the involvement of several stakeholders in creating the multi-layer network.
Even though system integrators were appointed in various states many months ago, there has been little progress on the ground in most cases, due to some infrastructural issues and non-availability of a common application software programme. The first phase of the launch in select districts will avoid Lakshadweep, Pondicherry, Punjab, Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Manipur.