Not one of them is air-conditioned (air-conditioning is not a luxury; it improves the productivity of the working staff exponentially); the toilets are grim, primitive and dirty; the paper forms are obsolete and incomprehensible; sometimes they run short of paper and ask you to write the complaint on “your own” paper in long-hand; hardly any of them have computers; where computers exist, they usually do not work due to “electricity power cuts” or sundry other reasons; the computers are not networked; there are no scanners to scan fingerprints; there are no digital cameras to photograph suspects and digitise the images; there are no video cameras to obtain quick depositions from complainants and witnesses; there is no intelligent work-flow software to hand over tasks from one employee to another. Above all, there is no networking; there is no centralised data base within a town let alone across the state or across the whole country. This means that if I commit a crime in one neighbourhood and move to another, I can literally “start afresh”; the laborious manual process of files going back and forth before my identity is established as the “same” criminal can take months and years although current (why current, even 10-year-old) technology makes that possible in minutes and seconds.
We claim to be an IT superpower (are we just one in the making, but never fully made?) and for at least several years now after we reduced tax rates to sensible rather than confiscatory levels, our state revenues have been rising dramatically. So presumably we have both the skills and the financial wherewithal to invest in making our police stations part of a modern, efficient, networked enterprise. But neither the Central government nor any state government (progressive or otherwise) has issued a simple tender document to Indian IT companies asking them to respond to a plan to do what can be done literally in a matter of months. Our mobile phone companies are able to build towers across the entire country and add millions of subscribers each month providing these customers with film songs, jokes, horoscopes, cricket scores and share prices in real time. Getting the police stations tapping into a networked centralised data base which includes printed texts, scanned documents, photographs, fingerprints and video footage within a matter of a year or at most two is technically feasible, eminently affordable and quite simply do-able.
The United States has introduced photographs and fingerprints at entry points like airports. This means that if you have a passport with a valid US visa and somebody steals it, he or she cannot get into the US as the thief will not have your face or fingerprints. The whole system was introduced in a couple of years and, according to reports, several thousand potential threats have been intercepted. In the United Kingdom, video cameras have been installed in a variety of public places. While this does not help much before-the-fact, it certainly helps in nabbing culprits after a terrorist attack. By their very existence they might be acting as a deterrent. Our breakthroughs have been a matter of good fortune. A journalist happened to have a video recording from the correct angle of Rajiv Gandhi’s last public meeting. If this “lucky” recording had not been there, we might still be grappling whether it was the LTTE or HUJI or some other mysterious force which killed him. A taxi driver with a good memory remembered dropping a couple off near the Gateway of India. Thank heavens for the taxi driver’s good memory. Otherwise, that blast too would have remained “unsolved”.
We cannot even argue that advanced technology works elsewhere, but not in India. The cricket betting scandal was detected and the culprits nailed in India, not in any other place simply because the police used cell phone recordings intelligently. Given a good data base that can be easily accessed and an information exchange network, our police and intelligence productivity will go up enormously. They will have fewer false leads to chase and be able to act on recent information instead of relying on dated paper records and lucky recollections.
As we speak, Indian IT professionals and companies directly or indirectly are helping to install better systems and software for the police and intelligence agencies of a dozen countries. The US Department of Homeland Security is tapping into talent globally to make sure that their systems are robust and that their software is embedded with intelligent algorithms. And they are in a tearing hurry to get ahead and stay ahead of the terrorists. It is ironic that the individuals who are solving the problems of other countries are not being harnessed to help India deal with its problems.
Clearly, technology cannot solve anything. We can never forget the importance of human intelligence and any police official who does not cultivate a good set of informers has learned nothing about policing. But technology can make us more efficient. It can improve our ability in the first place to predict and pre-empt and in the next to intercept and finally to apprehend criminal gangs who are out to destroy our social fabric. My friend Vijay Mukhi is trying to lead a group of concerned professionals (techies and others) to try and convince our governments, both at the Centre and in the states, to wake up to the fact that our IT prowess can mean not only export revenues but could also be leveraged as a national competitive strategic advantage in the areas of policing and anti-terrorist actions. One can only hope that someone in remote Delhi (Delhi feels remote to me anyway) or at least closer home in our state capitals will listen and act. Let me just re-emphasise that it’s easy, affordable and do-able. Can we just do it?