Around 27 Indian IT firms, including majors like Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Technologies and Wipro Ltd, are understood to have submitted their expressions of interest to develop a technology platform for the Centre's Crime and Criminal Tracking Networks and Systems project.
In June this year, the Rs 2,000-crore (Rs 20-billion) CCTNS project received approval from the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, following which the National Crime Records Bureau, which will implement the project, floated the EoIs.
The IT company that wins the bid will get to develop the core technology platform and software that will work as a standard for all Indian states to implement the project at the state level.
Other than creating a platform for sharing crime and criminal information (in the form of a web-based criminal record database) across the country, the CCTNS is expected to streamline investigation and prosecution processes; strengthen the intelligence-gathering machinery and improve the public delivery system.
This will also facilitate the collection, storage, retrieval, analysis, transfer and sharing of data and information among police stations, district and state headquarters and the controlling agencies at the central level.
The CCTNS is a mission mode project under the national e-Governance plan. The core application software will have to be developed so that it will operate regardless of low- or unreliable-bandwidth scenarios.
"The selected parties can pursue multiple opportunities at the state level. The prime aim of the project is to create an architecture using an application programming interface, so that the systems to be launched by each state would speak to each other," explained the Indian head of a software firm that has submitted an EoI for the project.
Before the CCTNS project was proposed, various state governments including those of Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka were either creating a web-enabled interface of the crime and criminal records or in the process of doing that.
In early 2008, for instance, the Gujarat government had signed an agreement with TCS to develop a technology platform that was aimed at enabling every police officer to have access to police records and background information at any given point of time.
India's third-largest IT services provider, Wipro, which has developed an integrated police information system, is pursuing opportunities in Karnataka.
"Wipro sees a huge role for information technology to combat high crime rates more effectively. Our technology will bring in a lot of efficiency and agility in the functioning between various units of the police department through real-time information sharing," said Ranbir Singh, general manager, government and defence, Wipro Infotech.
The government, however, has now made it clear that the states that have already deployed the technology to integrate the police records with the CCTNS and have to comply to the standards set by the National Crime Records Bureau at the central level.
