NCRB sets up vehicle information center

Rahul Gupta

Want to know the information whether a stolen vehicle has been recovered in any part of the country or the second hand vehicle you intend to buy is involved in any crime. Just pay an amount of Rs 10 at the counter of the office of National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) and you will get all information regarding that particular vehicle.

NCRB that has a national level data-bank of stolen and recovered vehicles has recently opened a stolen/recovered vehicle information center. It has developed a software called Property Co-ordination software which helps to gather information about all the stolen vehicles in the country and with just a click of the mouse, one can get all the necessary information about any stolen or recovered vehicle.

The whole system of NCRB is based on Intel architecture. "We chose Intel for the sake of reliability, scalability, speed, uniformity of operating system, software and training for the staff," said Harish Kumar, Director, NCRB.

The system is being rolled-out to all police headquarters and secondary offices, a total of 13,362 police stations and 1,128 jails. Currently, the network includes over 740 Intel PIII and P-Xeon processor-based servers.

The online component of the new system will also enable NCRB to make non-classified material available to the public on the Internet. Confidential information will be kept within the Police Network

(POLNET).

The State Crime Records Bureau (SCRB) receives all the data of stolen/recovered vehicles from District Crime Records Bureau (DCRB) and sends it to NCRB in New Delhi. 

"Despite the size of the project, the implementation has been easy. We needed a system with power and speed, which the PIII and P-Xeon processor-based servers provided for. We have also installed 950 desktops running Intel Celeron processors, which are extremely reliable. We have had no problems, even when we adapted our software to run on a Microsoft platform."

NCRB has the Crime Criminal Information System (CCIS) which is a database of crimes, criminals, lost and recovered property. The system is networked nationally between state capitals, with state police forces connected to their headquarters through regional networks. NCRB expects that by 2005 it will network to every police station in the country. CCIS standardizes the way criminal records are maintained across the country, for efficient sharing and coordination of information at national level. The system generates a unique number for every crime.

The Facial Analysis and Criminal Identification System (FACIS) allows officers to generate photofit portraits of suspects based on witness descriptions, a job that previously required expert artists. The Wanted Arrested Information System that they named as `TALASH' co-ordinates data on arrested persons with data on wanted persons. NCRB also has advanced automatic fingerprint identification system, FACTS. Developed jointly by NCRB and CMC, FACTS automates the matching of crime scene prints with those already on file. "India is one among the few countries with such a system," claimed Kumar.

(CNS)