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In a year, no more physical police verification for passports: Home Secy

Agencies
August 21, 2017

New Delhi, Aug 21: The physical police verification for getting a passport will soon be a thing of the past as the government plans to connect the service with a robust national database of crimes and criminals that will check the antecedents of applicants at the click of a mouse.

Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi said the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems Project (CCTNS) is expected to link with the passport service of the Ministry of External Affairs and it will replace physical police verification for passport applicants with online verification in a year.

"Police in some states are already using CCTNS for passport credentials. Police will be given hand held devices to go to an applicant's address and his or her details will be uploaded with the network. It will minimise contact with police and reduce time," he told reporters here.

Mehrishi was speaking after Home Minister Rajnath Singh launched a digital police portal under the CCTNS project, which aims to create a national database of crimes and criminals and connect country's all 15,398 police stations with it.

He said with the port, mandate of the CCTNS has been expanded by incorporating citizen centric services tenant verification, which could be done with the consent of the person being verified, quick registration of FIR in any crime and connecting the network with criminal justice delivery system.

Asked about the safety of the database, the home secretary said possibility of hacking was always there but enough safeguards have been put in place and the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre has been roped in for the task.

The home minister said the digital police portal will provide citizens, facility for online complaint registration and request for antecedent verification.

"The police portal will provide 11 searches and 46 reports from the national database for state police and central investigation agencies. Central investigating and research agencies have also been provided logins to the digital police database to access crime statistics," he said after launching the portal.

Singh said the CCTNS has enabled 13,775 out of 15,398 police stations to enter 100 per cent data into the software. He said as of now the CCTNS national database has around 7 crore data records pertaining to past and current criminal cases.

Singh said the CCTNS project will help in realising the Prime Minister Narenda Modi's dream of 'Minimum Government Maximum Governance'.

A home ministry official said the CCTNS will facilitate pan-India search on complete national crime and criminal database that is accessible to the investigating officers throughout the country.

The CCTNS project will interconnect about 15,398 police stations and additional 5,000 offices of supervisory police officers across the country and digitise data related to FIR registration, investigation and charge sheets in all police stations.

The project has been extended by the government for one year till March 2018.

The one-year extension will help the government to comprehensively achieve the remaining goals of the CCTNS, which was conceived by the former Home Minister P Chidambaram when the UPA was in power.

With a total budget of Rs 2,000 crore, a sum of Rs 1,550 crore has been spent till 2016-17.

The inter-operable criminal justice system aims to integrate the CCTNS project with e-courts and e-prison data bases in the first instance and with the other pillars of the criminal justice system, another official said.

The integration will be achieved by providing access to the judiciary, police and prisons through a desktop dashboard to facilitate expeditious and informed decisions and aid investigations.

The full implementation of the project with all the new components would lead to a central citizen portal having linkages with state-level citizen portals that will provide a number of citizen-friendly services, the official said.

These include services like police verification for various purposes like issuance of passport, reporting a crime and online tracking of the case progress, online reporting of grievances against police officials, accessing victim compensation fund and legal services etc.

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News Network
February 29,2020

Udupi, Feb 29: Senior Congress leader and Udupi’s crackers trader K Krishnaraja Saralaya allegedly committed suicide by jumping into a well outside his house at Paniyadi on Saturday.

He was 87, Krishnaraja was leading a solitary life. It is suspected that he ended his life ''due to mental agony''.

He is survived by two daughters. One is settled in Australia another is in Bengaluru. Saralaya had also served as President of Udupi Town Co-operative Society. The police visited the spot .

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coastaldigest.com web desk
July 23,2020

Bengaluru, July 23: The Janta Dal (Secular) and Congress that had joined hands together in Karnataka ‘to keep communal forces at bay, have once again turned archrivals. The development comes a year after the collapse of JD(S)-Congress coalition government in the state.

Recently, Leader of the Opposition Siddaramaiah claimed that the Congress would have won at least 10 seats in the Lok Sabha elections had it not been for the alliance with the JD(S). In response, former chief minister H D Kumaraswamy of the JD(S), who headed the coalition government, blamed the Congress for its many 'conspiracies'.

In a series of tweets on Wednesday, Kumaraswamy said he was prompted by Siddarmaiah's claims to recall what transpired during the coalition government. 

"There will never be a future alliance with Congress," Kumaraswamy declared, in a letter to his party colleagues on Wednesday. He claimed that there were many conspiracies on part of Congress, which led to the fall of the coalition government.

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News Network
January 21,2020

Jan 21: Indian policymakers may make it easier for companies to tap foreign funding, as a prolonged cash squeeze makes it tough for firms to borrow at home.

Investors are speculating about potential steps Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman could unveil when she presents the nation’s budget on Feb. 1. These measures may include freeing up firms to borrow at higher rates and offering tax breaks to global funds.

“The government will need to relax local rules to make it easier for Indian companies to raise debt overseas and tide over the funding crunch in the onshore market,” said Raj Kothari, London-based head of trading at Jay Capital Ltd. “At the same time, they need to ensure that the borrowers tapping offshore markets abide with stricter corporate governance so as to avoid further defaults.”

A prolonged crisis in India’s shadow bank sector and a pile of bad loans at traditional lenders is making it expensive for Indian companies, other than the best-rated firms, to access funding. The government has tried a series of measures to spur domestic credit, including providing so-called credit enhancement and allowing tiny firms to restructure debt.

Here are some steps Sitharaman may consider to spur foreign borrowing:

• She could raise the cap of 450 basis points above Libor, which limits overall foreign debt costs for Indian companies

• This could help lower-rated firms sell bonds abroad. Indian companies rated BBB currently borrow at more than 10%, about 3.8 percentage points more than their top-rated peers;

• Sitharaman could waive the withholding tax foreign investors need to pay on holdings of rupee-denominated debt sold by Indian companies abroad

• The waiver was offered between September 2018 to March 2019, but wasn’t extended as the highest global interest rates since the financial crisis deterred Indian borrowers. Since then, the three-month Libor has dropped by about 1 percentage point

• She could permit Indian property developers and housing finance lenders to sell overseas bonds for reasons beyond affordable housing projects

• New funding lines to the real estate sector, arguably ground zero of India’s economic slowdown, could help kickstart consumption and investment as the industry is the nation’s biggest job-creator.

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