Asish Mehta
Post News Network
Bhubaneswar, April 26: Orissa Police is cooling its heels over a project that it has set in motion two years ago – while many other states have made it fully operational years ago. The crime and criminal tracking network and systems (CCTNS) project is hardly operational here, and a police source bluntly called it a “bogus” project here.
CCTNS is a mission-mode project under the national e-governance pan of the Union Government which aims at creating a comprehensive and integrated system for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of policing through adoption of the principle of e-Governance and creation of a nationwide networking infrastructure for evolution of IT-enabled-state-of-the-art crime tracking system vis-a-vis investigation of crime and detection of criminals.
“Most of the police stations around the country have access to CCTNS, but the facility is yet to be implemented in most police stations in Orissa,” police sources said, adding one cited reason is the shortage of manpower to operate CCTNS.
An additional DCP-rank official at the Commissionerate Police told Orissa POST that the project is ‘partially’ implemented in a few police stations. This, as such, did not help much. The top cop also asserted that the registration of FIRs in police stations here is done through CCTNS.
“We are developing the infrastructure required for CCTNS. We are are also installing ‘generators’ in police stations here to give power back-up for the project. It will be fully operational here within the next five years,” he said nonchalantly.
What cops do now is resorting to the archaic or inadequate information dissemination systems. They exchange information through phone calls, or text messages, or by giving files to their colleagues by hand-delivery.
The CCTNS project envisions creation of services that can be availed directly by citizens through the nearest available mode such as internet, police station etc. This also implies that police personnel would have access to citizens’ complaints and requests from different sources in a real-time manner. This will enable faster means of resolution of a complaint or service request from the citizens.
The project also aims at accessing general services such as requests for certificates, verifications, permissions etc, a police official said.