Bengaluru to have online police verification process soon

If everything goes as planned, Bengaluru will become the first city to have online police verification process for passports in the country. This will be done through the proposed project of Home Ministry. This will be launched in the month of November.

Under this project, the head of district police such as SP or DCP can access the databases of National Population Register for doing online verification like address of the applicant, his/her address and criminal record. The databases include Aadhaar and the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System (CCTN).

The address, identity and other biometric data of the applicants will be checked in the database of Aadhar and NPR. Their criminal record will be checked on CCTN. CCTN is a complete database that facilitates criminal record checking as it is linked to around 14,000 police stations throughout the country.

The proposed project is initially launched in Bengaluru since Karnataka comprises of a strong police database. Police verification process consumes more time and remains one of the causes for the delay of the passport issue. The Online police verification process aims to reduce the time taken in the issuance of passports. If this project is successful, government aims to extend online police verification to the services such as verification of tenants, new government recruits and for background checks of probable employees by companies.

Image Credit: Sulthan90 / CC BY-SA 4.0

Image Reference: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indian_Passport_cover_2015.jpg