Digitisation efforts of arms licence under National Database of Arms licence (NDAl) has lost pace in Jharkhand with hiccups in the flow of information from a licensee’s end. Despite extension to complete the process by the fresh deadline of March 31, 2016, the department of Home appears short of confidence in meeting the deadline as it is battling to collect all information about arms, its seller and possessor.
According to reports, Jharkhand and few other states could not upload arms license data under the project by the earlier deadline of September 30, 2015 which made the Union government extend the cut-off date for completing the exercise. The digitisation exercise would replace the existing system of issuing arms license with a system of unique license number to an arms holder.
“Yes, the deadline has been extended. We are not getting most of the information from a license holder such as from where the purchase was made and so on. Yet, we are trying to complete the exercise,” said Deputy Secretary in the department of Home, Arvind Kumar.
Notably, existing arms licenses would become invalid in the absence of unique number from April 1, 2016. The earlier date of expiry of the existing license was October 1, 2015. The arms license details are being uploaded in each district by respective centres of National Informatics Centre in the NDAl database. However, progress of the exercise could not be ascertained as the number of licenses uploaded has been kept a closely guarded secret. Additional Chief Secretary of Home department, NN Pandey could not be reached for his comments and other officials feigned ignorance about Jharkhand’s less than satisfactory show.
“A lot has been achieved and we are trying to sort out the problem,” maintained the Deputy Secretary.
A senior official at the NIC state centre refused to part with the details of number of arms licenses uploaded into the NDAl database which will store information data about arms licenses being issued in the country by States, union territories and central Government.
File based manual method of storing information has thrown spanner in the digitisation works which requires additional information than what is maintained by each district on paper. Moreover, changes in certain type of information about a licensee have multiplied the efforts of putting arms license records up on the NDAl portal thus making the whole exercise a never ending process.
“lot of data could not be captured because of manual process of issuing license. So, we are facing problem in obtaining all the information, especially in cases where an arms licensee has changed his address,” said District Information Officer of NIC-Palamu, Ranvir Singh.
The DIOs of Dhanbad, Dumka, Deoghar asserted that arms digitisation in the respective district is nearly complete however numbers were not disclosed for NDAl being an affair confined completely to the people jostling to finish data upload before the fresh deadline.