600 criminals identified during beta testing of police search engine

Shiv Kumar
Tribune News Service
Mumbai, July 30

The beta testing of an offline search engine for the Mumbai police department helped identify nearly 600 wanted criminals and helped solve 85 cases in just a few days, according to police officials here.

"We had installed the system 17 days ago and were carrying various tests on the system. During the testing phase itself we solved 85 cases and identified 599 criminals," Mumbai police commissioner Sanjay Barve told reporters.

The search engine, named Maha AMBIS (Automated Multi-Model Biometric Identification System), was inagurated by Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis as a pilot project on Monday.

According to state government sources say, the architecture of the AMBIS system was provided by a French company while it was modified by its Indian associates.

As part of the pilot project, the Mumbai police have fed bio-metric data on a large number of criminals along with other information about them in the data-base. 

"The system will help us match finger prints, palm prints, retinal scans, etc," says Inspector General Brijesh Singh who heads the cyber cell of the state police.

So far 6.5 lakh criminal records have been stored in the system. The city police have installed hardware to access the AMBIS system in 94 police stations across Mumbai.

Fadnavis told reporters that the system will soon rolled out in different parts of Maharashtra as well.

Home department sources say, the Maharashtra government plans to roll out the AMBIS system to all the police stations in the state. 

The police department too will ensure that most police personnel are provided with login ids and passwords so that they can search the database as part of their investigations.

According to state government sources, the Union Home Ministry too has expressed interest in the AMBIS system and proposes to roll it out elsewhere in the country.