• The Union government has awarded the Assam Police for “good practices” under the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS), an e-governance project.
• The award was given for citizen centric service delivery, in which the state police has automated passport verification and Permanent Residential Certificate (PRC) services using the online CCTNS.
• Earlier, manual passport police verification used to take a considerable time, which has been reduced to a maximum of 21 days as per passport requirements. Similarly for PRC, the students need not submit the police verification separately now, which was delaying the entire process.
• The ministry of home affairs (MHA) has also awarded Anil Kumar Jha, Special Director General (CID) of the Assam Police, for his outstanding contribution in implementing the project.
• The award was handed over to the Assam Police on October 30 during the two-day conference on “CCTNS—Good practices and Success Stories” organised by the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) in New Delhi.
• Assam Police had launched a Citizen Portal on January 1, 2016 and currently offers 10 types of services for the people, thereby bringing policing closer to the public.
• To extend the service, the police plans to launch within a year a digital platform for submission of time bound accident information report by police to Motor Accident Claim Tribunal (MACT) 

What is CCTNS project?

• Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) is a project initiated in June 2009 which aims at creating a comprehensive and integrated system for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of policing at the Police Station level.
• This will be done through adoption of principles of e-Governance, and creation of a nationwide networked infrastructure for evolution of IT-enabled state-of-the-art tracking system around “investigation of crime and detection of criminals”.
• CCTNS is a Mission Mode Project (MMP) under the National e-Governance Plan of Govt. of India.
• The Project will interconnect about 15000 Police Stations and additional 5000 offices of supervisory police officers across the country and digitize data related to FIR registration, investigation and charge sheets in all Police Stations.
• It will not only automate Police functions at Police station and higher levels but will also create facilities and mechanism to provide public services like registration of online complaints, ascertaining the status of case registered at the police station, verification of persons etc.
• In 2015, an additional objective of establishing a basic platform for an Inter-operable Criminal Justice System (ICJS) was added to the Project.