The home ministry is working on an ambitious project to collect the fingerprints, palm prints, faces and iris samples of all the arrested and convicted persons in the country and store these in a central database. This biometric data will be accessible to all the police units across the country for getting real-time results on the identity of a suspect.
This national-level system, called the automated multimodal biometric identification system (AMBIS), will rival the much-acclaimed 'FBI Biometric Center of Excellence' in the US which has the biometric records of over 94 lakh offenders. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) plans to execute AMBIS in the next phase of the Rs. 2,000-crore 'crime and criminal tracking network and systems' (CCTNS) project linking 14,000 police stations and 6,000 other police offices by 2013.
Currently, each state police unit is on its own to match a fingerprint sample from its limited records. Asking another state to compare a criminal's fingerprint sample with its records or approaching the NCRB is a tedious and time-consuming process as the police stations are not linked to one another. For a country grappling with terror, this is hardly the ideal situation.
The AMBIS, which plans to drastically change this scenario, will keep 1.5 crore records of face, finger and iris, besides 30 lakh records of palm prints. With the response time for each search being less than three minutes, it will be able to carry out 10,000 identification searches in a day. The identification system will have a criminal attribute database (CADB) in searchable format, which will enable a 24x7 interface between the NCRB and the state units. The AMBIS will ultimately be joined with the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) project to allow the investigating and enforcement agencies to access real-time information for planning timely and appropriate responses to the security challenges in India.
"We intend to build and maintain a national repository of criminal biometrics in a central system. This biometric data will also be compatible with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) standards," a home ministry official said.
NCRB director general N. K. Tripathi told MAIL TODAY that while a central database on fin-gerprints will be incorporated within the CCTNS project by 2013, the face and iris biometrics would be included in the next phase. "A fingerprint enrolment device is being given to each police station in the country to capture the prints of all the people accused of crimes having a punishment of more than a year and all convicted persons. This data will be linked to the state crime record bureaux and the entire data will then be diverted to the NCRB," Tripathi said.
He said it would enable a pan-India search for fingerprint records in real-time. "Right now, this process takes months. Lots of time is wasted and there is a question mark on the certainty of the results. The AMBIS project will have far-reaching effects," Tripathi added.
In this context, India is learning from the FBI, which maintains the largest DNA repository in the world - the National DNA Index System (NDIS), which contains more than 94,04,747 offender profiles. The FBI maintains records of face, fingerprint, iris, palm prints, DNA and voice, which can be quickly compared with a sample.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Aman Sharma
Quelle/Source: India Today, 28.10.2011
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