New Rule: No Police Verification for New Passports

The Centre plans to merge the process with Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems Project (CCTNS), a project first conceptualised by the UPA government in 2009; this will eliminate the need of doing the physical police verification for getting a new passport.

With the implementation of CCTNS, the manual process of police verification could be simplified with just a few clicks. Also, the old process which resulted in bribing the local police officers when they come to verify the address and identity will come at a halt.

As per the Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi said the CCTNS, an exhaustive national database of crimes and criminals was expected to be linked with the passport service of the External Affairs Ministry. CCTNS will check the past history and background of the applicsingle click.

National database

Mr. Mehrishi told reports “For passport credentials, police is already using CCTNS in some states. Police will be given handheld devices to upload applicant’s details upon reaching their home. This will not only minimize the contact of the applicant with the police officer to curb bribing but also reduce the time for getting the passport.”

After Home Minister Rajnath Singh launched the CCTNS project, which will connect all the 15,398 police stations of the county, Mr. Mehrishi said the CCTNS had been expanded for further use by incorporating citizen-centric services like – tenant verification, which could be done with the consent of the person being verified, connecting the network with criminal justice delivery system and quick registration of FIR in any crime.

Adding about the safety of the database, the Home Secretary said “chances of database hacking was always there, but enough provisions have been made to safeguard the same and National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre had been employed for the task.

The Home Minister said the digital police would facilitate citizens to register complaints online and request for background verifications with just a few clicks. “The police portal will give 11 searches and 46 reports from the national database for state police and central investigation agencies. Central investigating and research agencies have also been provided logins to the digital police database to access crime statistics,” Mr. Singh said.

Mr. Singh said the CCTNS has resulted 13,777 police stations out of 15,398 to register 100% data into the software. He said so far, 7 crore data records related to past and current criminal cases is already there in the CCTNS national database. The project will make it possible to link about 15,398 police stations and 5,000 offices of supervisory police officers across the country.