Inclusion of the existing manual police verification is intended to fast track issue of passports online with a click on the CCTNS and end altogether bribing of the local police, who come to verify address and identity of the applicants. CCTNS, an exhaustive national data base of crimes and criminals, has been linked with the passport services of the Ministry of External Affairs. CCTNS will check the past history and background of the applicants with a single click.

To begin with, police have already started using CCTNS in some States as a pilot project. Under the scheme, police would be given hand held devices (computer) to upload details of applicants to eliminate their contact with the police to end bribe and reduce the time frame for issue of passports.

However, the new process will be disadvantageous to applicants belonging to weaker sections, dalits, minorities and other vulnerable persons, who are generally victims of frame-up machinations of police high handedness, through online CCTNS filtration as against physical police verifications where they get away by paying bribes. Under the existing manual verifications, such applicants get clearance by paying bribes to the police. However, Government hopes to eliminate militants, subversives, terrorists, naxals, economic offenders, dreaded criminals, history-sheeters etc. from obtaining passports through this process. As usual, such persons will always devise ingenious alternatives to dodge the systems, where police may call the petitioner to police station and get bribe before online clearance. In our system, it will be anathema if police can function without bribe.

CCTNS connects all the 15,398 police stations across the country. It’s role has been extended to incorporate citizen-centric services like tenant verification, to be done with the consent of the person being verified, connecting the network with the criminal justice delivery system and quick registration of First Information Report (FIR) in any crime.

National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIIPC) has been employed for safety of the CCTNS data base despite chances of its hacking. Digital police would facilitate citizens under CCTNS to register complaints online and request for background verifications with a few clicks. The police portal will give eleven searches and 46 reports from the national data base for State police and Central investigation agencies.

Under the CCTNS, Central investigating and research agencies have been empowered to log-ins in the digital police data base to access crime statistics. CCTNS, connecting all the 15398 police stations, will register 100 per cent data into the software. It will link all police stations and 5000 offices of supervisory police officers through out the country. CCTNS is intended to form part of the evolving security surveillance regime of the NDA Union Government!