Implementation of CCTNS project extended by one year

The implementation of the CCTNS project, which aims to create a national database of crimes and criminals, has been extended by the government for one year till March 2018.

The decision has been taken at a meeting of the Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi here today.

"The cabinet approves one-year extension of implementation of Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems Project beyond March 31, 2017," an official spokesperson said.

The one-year extension will help the government to comprehensively achieve the remaining goals of the CCTNS, which was conceived by the former Home Minister P Chidambaram when the UPA was in power.
 

With a total budget of Rs 2,000 crore, a sum of Rs 1,550 crore which was the total allocation to the project so far has been spent till 2016-17.

Inter-operable criminal justice system aims to integrate CCTNS project with e-courts and e-prison data bases in the first instance and with the other pillars of the criminal justice system.

The integration will be achieved by providing access to the judiciary, police and prisons through a desktop dashboard to facilitate expeditious and informed decisions and aid investigations.

The CCTNS will facilitate pan-India search on complete national crime and criminal database that is accessible to the investigating officers throughout the country.

CCTNS project will interconnect about 15,000 police stations and additional 5,000 offices of supervisory police officers across the country and digitize data related to FIR registration, investigation and chargesheets in all police stations.

This would lead to development of a national database of crimes and criminals.

The full implementation of the project with all the new components would lead to a central citizen portal having linkages with state-level citizen portals that will provide a number of citizen-friendly services.

These include services like police verification for various purposes like issuance of passport, reporting a crime and online tracking of the case progress, online reporting of grievances against police officials, accessing victim compensation fund and legal services etc.