BHUBANESWAR: Unauthorised personnel submitting charge sheet, filing of arrest and seizure reports before FIR registration and privacy breaches - the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India has flagged serious lapses in implementation of the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System (CCTNS) in Odisha.
The audit has exposed privacy breaches and lapses in investigation and prosecution. In 1,631 cases at 405 police stations, details of women victims and juvenile offenders classified as sensitive were disclosed on the citizen portal.
The report flagged alarming user management lapses due to which unauthorised personnel were found filing charge sheets, while faulty mapping of police stations with supervisory authorities forced officials to rely on offline manual records. Multiple IDs for the same accused and complainants further compromised data integrity.
The auditors detected significant control failures in case registration. In some instances, arrests and seizures were recorded before the filing of FIRs, raising concerns about possible backend tampering. The system was rarely used for preparing charge sheets or monitoring prosecutions as 190 of the 368 cases were reported as closed even as charge sheets were not submitted in the courts concerned.
“While 5,566 cases of missing children below 18 years were recorded without mandatory FIRs, 9,642 non-cognisable cases went unrecorded by 29 police stations in the system,” the report read.
The audit report, tabled in the Assembly on Wednesday, pointed out several deficiencies that undermined the core objectives of digitisation, case tracking, database and charge-sheet preparation and transparency.
CCTNS was implemented in Odisha from 2013 and an expenditure of Rs 176.16 crore was incurred on it jointly by the Centre (Rs 66.75 crore) and the state government (Rs 109.41 crore) as of March 2023. Audit noticed flaws in planning, implementation and monitoring of the project since inception.
“There were irregularities in the tendering process adopted by the State Crime Records Bureau (SCRB), resulting in extension of undue benefit to the selected software services provider,” the report stated.
The CAG found that digitisation of past crime records was incomplete and inconsistent. Although the system integrator NIIT Technologies was to digitise records from 2001 to 2010 along with ongoing cases, the SCRB restricted digitisation to cases from January 2003 to December 2012, violating the agreement.
The CAG noticed that only 1,808 court disposal memos were recorded against over 7.44 lakh FIRs, reflecting a massive gap in documentation and case monitoring. There were also deficiencies in the system process related to synchronisation of data between the local offline servers and the central online server of CCTNS.
“Monitoring mechanisms also failed to deliver as four committees were constituted to review the progress but their meetings were irregular with shortfalls ranging between 69 per cent and 98 per cent. Field staff were not adequately equipped to operate the system, leading to dependence on manual practices, the report added.