Puri: In an effort to keep a tab on the occupants in hotels and lodgings in the pilgrim city, the police have developed specially-designated software to maintain an online database.
The software has been developed by the district police with the help of a Hyderabad-based IT firm. All the hotel and lodge owners have been asked to login to the software and submit detail regarding their customers.
“All the hotel and lodge owners will be provided with user IDs and passwords. They will login to the software and upload the occupants’ lists on a daily basis. This practice will commence from January 1,” superintendent of police (SP) Sarthak Sarangi said.
There are more than 700 hotels, lodges and holiday homes in the pilgrim city. In view of safety, installation of CCTV cameras has been made compulsory for all hotels. The hotel owners have been asked to provide lists of the tourists staying at their hotels. Besides, the hotel owners have been asked to keep photocopy of the guests’ identity cards.
“Earlier, the hotel owners had been providing the lists of occupants to us in a written format. Many hotels even failed to comply. Since November 1 this year, we asked the hotel owners to provide the lists of the occupants online. However, as the hotel owners randomly put the lists of the occupants online in their own formats, it created a lot of problem for us to maintain the database. So we decided to develop the new software for the purpose,” Sarangi said.
PNN
