Taking a serious note of discrepancy in the collection of crime data, the Home Ministry has merged the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) with the Bureau of Police Research & Development (BPR&D).
The NCRB was established in 1986 with the mandate to empower Indian Police with information technology solutions and criminal intelligence to enable them to enforce the law effectively. The BPR&D was established in 1970 after the MHA gave a new orientation to then existing Police Research and Advisory Council set up in 1966 with the primary objective of modernization of police force. The Home Ministry has issued an order in this regard.
"In order to improve administrative efficiency and optimal utilisation of resources of BPR&D and NCRB, the competent authority has decided to merge both the organisations with immediate effect," the order said. The order has been issued by Under Secretary, Raman Kumar, who clearly specifies that NCRB Director Ish Kumar from now onwards will report to BPR&D Director General MC Borwankar. The BPRD Director General (DG) will be the head of the merged new entity, where the NCRB Director, an Additional DG rank post will report to the former.
Reacting to the merger of the two organisations, officials said that the merger of both department will help in effectively carry out research in policing matters and eventually improve law enforcement and correctional administrations.
According to officials, the NCRB's important project Crime and Criminal Tracking Networks and Systems (CCTNS) will give a back up to research carried out in these fields. "It will have lot of potentials," said officials. CCTNS is a project for creating a comprehensive and integrated system for effective policing through e-Governance.
NCRB was also behind starting Crime Criminal Information System (CCIS) in 1994 for extracting data pertaining to Crime and Criminal and Property as received from State Crime Records Bureaus and generating various reports. Started since 1994, it has database has approximately 4,33,78,448 on records as on 2016. From this year, the data is now being captured through Common Application Software under CCTNS project. It also started Common Integrated Police Application (CIPA) in 2004 which helps in significant reduction in manual records/register maintenance at police stations, elimination of duplicate and inconsistent record keeping, facilitate maintenance of details of criminals and keep track of the status of cases, The CCTNS projected started in 2009 connects approximately 12794 police stations and 6000 higher offices in the country.
On the other hand, BPR&D has contributed for the development of State Police and Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) by strengthening their human resources through training and research. BPR&D, which also comes under MHA, is a think-tank as well as a research and training organisation dedicated for the development of law enforcement and correctional administration in the country.
Recently, NCRB has announced that from next year they will be also keeping a data mob lynching cases as there was no such record so far. Till now there are no specific or clear statistics are available on how many incidents of mob violence, lynching or death have occurred.