<div>Criminals who commit crime in one state and hide in another may soon have nowhere to go as the Ministry of Home Affairs has begun the process of connecting all of the country's police stations by digitising their records. Data ranging from FIRs, criminal records, investigation reports and results will be put up online to be accessed from any of the other police stations. <br /><br />The first phase ending 2014 will link up over 14,000 police stations and 6,000 higher police offices across the 35 states and union territories of India. The project was envisioned by the Home Ministry in 2012 to create a nation-wide network of IT infrastructure for technology enabled criminal tracking system.<br /><br />The process was put in place about a year back and has already been completed in states such as Orissa and Jharkhand, and is in the works in states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Uttaranchal, and Uttar Pradesh.<br /><br />The idea is to get all records in every police station in a given state to first be digitalised and then put these records online in a manner that allows records of one state police corp to be accessible to all other state police corps as well.<br /><br />“The challenge in implementation, however, is that a lot of these records are in vernacular languages like Tamil, Malay and Bengali, which will have to be translated and then digitised,” says Arvind Thakur, CEO, NIIT Technologies. NIIT Tech is working on digitisation of these records in over five states and says that the average size of a contract per state is to the tune of Rs 300 crore.<br /><br />In the process, say companies, that are bidding for the digitisation contracts, approximately, 3 million court records, lists of pending cases, FIRs among other documentation will go online. Besides NIIT, other IT players like Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services, are also in the process of bidding for these contracts.<br /><br /><br />swati(dot)garg(at)abp(dot)in<br />ms(dot)garg(dot)swati(at)gmail<br />Twitter: (at)swatigarg <br /><br /> </div>
