Kochi: The centralised National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS) has played a crucial role in helping investigators track down suspects in thousands of criminal cases across the country. Currently the system stores the fingerprints of over 1.53 crore offenders, making it one of the most comprehensive databases of its kind.

When an individual is arrested, their fingerprints are collected and assigned a unique identification number. This data will be accessible to all the investigation agencies across the country. These prints are then cross-checked with those already in the system to determine if there is a match with evidence collected from crime scenes. This will ease the identification process of the suspects and new fingerprints will be added to the data.

The database is accessible to 840 district police units, 74 police commissionerates, 70 central investigative agencies, and both central and state fingerprint bureaus. State-level agencies have been provided with a dedicated Virtual Private Network (VPN) identification number.

The centralisation of fingerprint records, which were earlier maintained separately by each state, was completed in 2022. Now, every police station across the country has been digitised under the initiative Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS).

In addition to fingerprints, the digital crime tracking system has made available:

  • Over 140 million First Information Reports (FIRs) and related documents online.
  • Data from 22.5 million cases through the e-Prison platform.
  • Prosecution details of 19.5 million cases via e-Prosecution.
  • More than 4 million forensic records are accessible under E-Forensics.