Mumbai: The Mumbai Police will be adding iris scanners to their repertoire of high-tech crime fighting gadgetry, as part of their initiative to store fingerprints of arrested accused digitally.
A senior officer said, “The project is still in the test phase. We have to ensure that the technology works in sync with our existing infrastructure. We are installing iris scanners in each police station along with the fingerprint scanners, and are testing them.”
Another officer said the entire project should be operational in a month, and police station personnel are being trained to use iris and fingerprint scanners. He said the data will be stored in a central police server for easy access by security agencies and police stations across the country, and speed up the search for past criminal records of arrested accused.
The server will be linked to the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System (CCTNS), a pan-India database of all those with criminal records. The police are also exploring the option of linking the server to the Aadhaar database for verifying backgrounds of Aadhaar card applicants.
The initiative is among several undertaken by the police over the past year to digitise operations, including circulating the daily police notice in digital format, uploading profiles of each police officer to a common server and setting up an intranet server for daily communication between police personnel.
Other measures currently being worked on include a messenger service like WhatsApp for police personnel and making all police department transactions cashless.
