Security check: PM Modi reviews working of NATGRID, CCTNS, disaster meet

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday reviewed the working of the NATGRID and CCTNS besides preparation for an international disaster risk reduction conference to be held in New Delhi in November.[caption id=“attachment_2826630” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Prime Minister Narendra Modi. PTI[/caption] Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi gave presentations on NATGRID, a robust intelligence gathering mechanism to be set up to track any terror suspect and incident, and CCTNS, a synchronise online initiative for tracking crime and criminals by integrating 15,000 police stations across the country. Both the initiatives are yet to be fully operationalised and the Prime Minister was told that works are on for their early completion, official sources said. As per the home ministry proposal, the NATGRID, which is still in nascent stage, in different phases will connect data providing organisations and users besides developing a legal structure through which information can be accessed by the law enforcement agencies. In the first phase, 10 user agencies and 21 service providers will be connected, while in later phases about 950 additional organisations will be connected and another over 1,000 organisations in the subsequent years. These data sources include records related to immigration entry and exit, banking and financial transactions and telecommunications. The agencies include the Intelligence Bureau, local police and revenue and customs departments. While the clearance for Rs 3,400 crore project from the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) came in 2011, execution of the project slowed down after the exit of Home Minister P Chidambaram in July 2012. There are around 70 personnel, drawn from both the government and private sectors, in NATGRID. The Modi government in November last year gave its approval for completion of the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network Systems (CCTNS), a project conceived by the previous UPA government, by March 2017. CCTNS project will interconnect about 15,000 police stations and additional 5,000 offices of supervisory police officers across the country and digitise data related to FIR registration, investigation and chargesheets in all police stations. This would lead to development of a national database of crimes and criminals. The full implementation of the project with all the new components would lead to a central citizen portal having linkages with state level citizen portals that will provide a number of citizen-friendly services. These include services like police verification for various purposes like issuance of passport, reporting a crime and online tracking of the case progress, online reporting of grievances against police officials, accessing victim compensation fund and legal services etc. The Prime Minister also took stock of the preparations for the first meeting pertained to Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, which will be held in New Delhi in November, in collaboration with United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. PTI