National Crime Records Bureau The National Crime Records Bureau empowers the police force with CCIS 2k.1, an application built on the Windows platform. The National Crime Records bureau is an important department of the Ministry of Home Affairs. It functions a clearing house for information related to crimes conducted in the country. This, is no easy job, considering India has 16 percent of the world's population, and registers 5 million crimes annually, logged at 706 police districts in 35 states. One of the first few departments to use Information Technology to its benefit, NCRB wanted to put in place a system that would allow access to and the sharing of hundreds of thousands of crime records created over decades, which existed in databases of police districts across the country. With this end in mind, the NCRB conceptualized the Windows based CCIS (Crime Criminal Information System Version 2k.1) in 1999. In conjunction with Microsoft, it commenced on the roll out of a national network, with the police headquarters at the district and state levels connected to one another, and to the central data repository at the NCRB in New Delhi. Situation Efforts towards computerization of police records had begun in 1994, though the hardware and application installation concluded in December 1995. The application, CCIS version 1.0, was Unix based with Ingress as the RDBMS. This implementation did provide NCRB with a mechanism to store records, but the other objective of sharing this information could not be met. Additionally, NCRB was concerned about the state of readiness of the existing infrastructure, and its ability to meet future needs. Hardware that was now obsolete One of NCRB's key concerns was the hardware implementation, which was considered state of the art at the time it was implemented, but had now become obsolete. The district headquarters had been provided with 486's, with 560MB / 1GB hard disks, allocated on the basis of the rate of crime, and therefore the storage capacity that would be required. Additionally, the hardware infrastructure included dumb terminals that merely served as input devices. Conducting upgrades or installing new intelligent applications on a regular basis in itself was a daunting task. Rigid and Expensive Software The other issue that NCRB faced was with regard to the maintenance and up-gradation of the software. Working with the Unix system required high degrees of technical expertise, and professionals with the required skills were hard to come by. In 1999 as NCRB planned its application revamp, one key influencer was the fact that Y2k was around the corner. A question for NCRB was whether to go in for a complete system overhaul, or try and make the existing system Y2k compliant, while including modules that would make CCIS the perfect application.

Solution Overview Company National Crime Records bureau Profile The National Crime Records bureau is an important department of the Ministry of Home Affairs. It functions a clearing house for information related to crimes conducted in the country. Scenario NCRB required a system that would allow access to and the sharing of the hundreds of thousands of crime records created over decades, which existed in databases of police districts across the country. Microsoft technologies used Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server IMicrosoft SQL Server 7 Enterprise Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Microsoft Exchange Solution A faster to implement, easier to use, future ready software option NCRB decided that an overhaul was the way to go. The time, resource, skills training and monetary investments required to make the Unix based system all that NCRB needed the application to be, could not be justified. As is with any project of this scale and size, NCRB sent for requests for proposal to several vendors and solution providers including Oracle, Microsoft, TCS and Mastek. Microsoft won the contract, with a SQL Server 7.0, Exchange Server and Windows 2000 based offering. Commenting on the reasons for choosing the Microsoft platform, Mr. V.S. Chaudhary, the coordinator for the project said, "The strategic strengths of Microsoft were the obvious reasons for it being our partner in this project. They provide an end to end offerings, and their products are the quick to deploy and easy to use. Not only that, the Microsoft Consulting Services provided us with ideal technical support during implementation - that's exactly what we needed." While they worked on creating the latest version of CCIS, NCRB implemented some patches to address the Y2k issue, as a stop gap arrangement. NCRB and Microsoft- An exemplary team With several NCRB officials having varied programming experiences, it was easy for them to provide the overall vision and guidance for the application architecture. Microsoft, on its part provided round the clock technical support with its own consulting team. In July 2000 the new application was launched as CCIS version 2k.1. CCIS Version 2k.1 CCIS version 2k.1 is a Windows based application that stores records related to crimes and criminals, and lost and recovered property. The application resides at the NCRB office in New Delhi, and runs in district headquarters across the country. Records fed in at the district level are periodically thresholded at the center through the Offline/ Online system of data transfer, in the absence of an active online system. The Integrated Information Forms (IIFs) serve as the backbone of the application, which link 140 tables, 120 forms and 160 parameters related to crimes, criminals and property. CCIS 2k.1 is potentially the largest police application in the world. Implementation Challenges For the successful implementation of CCIS version 2k.1, NCRB required to accomplish the twin tasks of staff training and data migration. Staff Training To this end, NCRB set up seven core teams, comprising eight - ten members each, and headed by a nodal officer. These teams were first trained on the application by Mr. V S Chaudhary - and then made responsible for the training of a cluster of states under their jurisdiction. For conducting training, each state was divided into three sections, where meets for district representatives were held. The training covered basics such as the loading of the application, data entry and migration, and CCIS usage related topics. The ease of use of the Windows platform ensured that the training could be conducted in the shortest time possible. Data Migration With the training complete, the first task at hand was to port all the active data from the Unix system to the Windows based CCIS2k.1. A separate module that converted the Unix data into intermediate flat-files was added, after which the files could easily be transferred to the Windows environment. CCIS Version 2k.1: Functional Country-Wide Having accomplished the tasks of staff training and data migration, NCRB launched CCIS 2k.1 in July 2000. CCIS Version 2k.2 Within a few months of the implementation, feedback and suggestions were solicited from the sates and these started flowing in regularly. In the process, coding issues, and bugs were found and eliminated, while new features were added to meet the specific needs of the state police. The enhanced CCIS version 2k.2 was launched in May 2001. As it was earlier, comprehensive training sessions were conducted with the objective of helping the administrators upgrade version 2k.1 to 2k.2, and teaching them how to upgrade the database. Benefits To NCRB Today, CCIS is in the process of standardizing the way criminal records are maintained across the country, allowing efficient sharing of information and facilitating greater coordination at a national level. The application is partially available on a nationwide network today, and provides access to more than 5,300,000 records that are centrally located at NCRB. Owed to the Windows 2000 platform, currently CCIS also provides support for Hindi, which NCRB plans to extend to other regional languages in a phased manner. For the Common Man Today, CCIS also allows citizens to easily access and obtain several types of documentation from the NCRB. These include information on tainted vehicles, information on tainted fire-arms, domestic servant verification and instant passport verification. The application of this can be extended to cover other areas like providing copies of FIR registration directly at a police station in the future. The Vision of NCRB NCRB believes that CCIS has provided them with enough and more than what it had first conceived the application to achieve. The next step is to localize the application in other regional languages, which the NCRB plans to do in a phased manner of the next few years. If all goes as envisioned, even police posts in India, a lakh of them across the country, will be connected to the network, and have direct access to information as per their need.