New law to record prisoners’ data

Ever been put behind bars If any person faces arrest, he or she may soon find it difficult to erase the past as the Narendra Modi government is planning to amend the Identification of Prisoners Act 1920 to capture biometric data on all arrested persons in prisons across India. The Identification of Prisoners Act 1920 was enacted on September 9, 1920 to authorise the taking of “measurement” and “photographs” of convicts and other such persons.

At present, the security agencies cannot know if a person has ever been to jail till he is a convict.

The old law may be repealed and a new law brought in to allow the police and prison authorities to record biometric details of all arrested persons, that will further help the security agencies to verify their antecedents while probing any kind of crimes or other offences, ranging from money-laundering to cheque-bouncing complaints. For any police verification in future, the records will show that the person was arrested if his biometrics are available.

This move is a key part of digitisation of police records and overhaul of internal security and counter-terror steps by the NDA government.

On many occasions, an arrested person gets freed on bail immediately, or stays as an undertrial for years, but none of this gets reflected in his/her records, virtually making it impossible to know about the arrest, government sources said. With the new law in place, any person who is at any time formally arrested by the police will have to share his/her biometric details, besides clicking of photographs and sharing measurements. The police and the prison authorities will get the power to collect this data, which can then be made available along with all other prison and police records to the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and System (CCTNS), that has recently been given a fresh infusion of funds. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set March 2016 as the deadline for the CCTNS to be rolled out across the country.