India plans database of 15 million convicted criminals
Indian Border Security Force (BSF) personnel pay tribute at the Martyrs Memorial as they observe Police Commemoration Day at BSF campus, Frontier Headquarters, in Gandhinagar, some 30 kms. from Ahmedabad, on October 21, 2011. A total of 634 personnel from state police and paramilitary forces like the Border Security Force, the CRPF and the National Security Guard were killed during a period from September 1, 2010 and August 31 this year, according to official figures.
India's home ministry is gearing up to collect the fingerprints, palm prints, faces and iris samples of arrested suspects and convicted criminals for input into a central database, reports India Today.
Currently, police in India's 28 states and seven union territories have only their own limited records of fingerprints to work with when attempting to identify suspects, the paper said, as the sharing of information is a "tedious and time-consuming process."
In contrast, the new national 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 9.4 million offenders, India Today said. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) plans to execute AMBIS in the next phase of the $400 million 'crime and criminal tracking network and systems' (CCTNS) project linking 14,000 police stations and 6,000 other police offices by 2013.
AMBIS will maintain 150 million records of face, finger and iris, besides 3 million records of palm prints, the paper said. 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.
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