The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) has developed India’s first database of arrested narcotics offenders. It is now operational for use by various central and state prosecution agencies tasked to enforce anti-drug laws in the country.
The National Integrated Database on Arrested Narco-offenders (NIDAAN) is a part of the narcotics coordination mechanism (NCORD) portal that was launched by Union Home Minister Amit Shah on July 30 in Chandigarh during the national conference on ‘Drug trafficking and national security’.
According to a senior officer, NIDAAN sources its data from the ICJS (inter-operable criminal justice system) and the e-Prisons (a cloud-based application) repository and it is planned to integrate it in the future with the crime and criminal tracking network system or CCTNS.
The ICJS — an initiative of the Supreme Court e-committee — was created to enable the seamless transfer of data and information among different pillars of the criminal justice system, like courts, police, jails and forensic science laboratories, from a single platform.
NIDAAN holds the data of people who have been arrested and are serving jail time for "directly or indirectly involved in the produce, manufacture, possession, selling, purchase, transport, warehousing, usage, consumption, inter-state import and export, import into India, export from India or transhipment of any narcotics or psychotropic substance."
"NIDAAN is a one-stop solution for all narcotics offenders' related data and will help investigative agencies as an effective tool to connect the dots while probing narcotics cases," NCB Director General S N Pradhan told PTI.
The idea to create such a portal was to enhance the capability of all the law enforcement agencies working against drug crimes, he said.
Through the portal, any agency can search for the criminal history, personal details, fingerprints, court cases and appeals made etc. with regard to a drug offender from any part of the country.
A distinct feature called 'criminal network' on the portal can also be accessed by agencies, as part of which specific links of an accused to other crimes, linked police FIRs and those who visited them in jail can also be accessed.
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The NIDAAN portal is a vertical envisaged under the NCORD and was mooted during a national meeting on drug issues chaired by Home Minister Shah in December last year in Delhi. During the meeting, Shah also asked all states to create a dedicated anti-narcotics task force (ANTF) which can also function as the NCORD secretariat at the state level.
The minister had also directed the agencies to "take some important measures such as the creation of a national NCORD portal, the constitution of inter-ministerial standing committees (IMCs) to devise effective policies with regard to dual-use prescription drugs and precursors, raising of a national narco-canine pool and establishment of drug de-addiction centres in all prisons of 272 most drugs affected districts etc."
(With PTI inputs)
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