State to introduce online criminal justice system

KOLKATA: The state Correctional Administration department will soon unveil Interoperable Criminal Justice System (ICJS) through which everything right from the lodging of FIR against an offender to the production at court and finally to the prison will be digitised.

"It will enable in seamless transfer of data and information among different pillars of the criminal justice system like courts, police and correctional homes. Forensic laboratory evidence is an integral part in most criminal cases now a days so it will also be integrated in this platform. The work for developing the infrastructure is in its final stages," a senior official of the Correctional Administration department said.

Once the system is developed, the metadata of FIR and chargesheet can be accessed by the High Court and the subordinate courts. The documents like FIR, case diary and chargesheet will be uploaded by police in PDF format for utilisation by the courts. All relevant information of a particular case will be available in real time for use by the courts. Compliance of judicial orders and summons can also be achieved expeditiously. "We can go for 100 per cent e-court production of the inmates facing trial, when we launch the ICJS system. Bengal has already started e-court production and in the last two years there has been 1.36 lakh production when inmates from prisons have not been produced physically in court," the official added. Bengal was the first among all states to roll out e -prisons in August 2017 that provides real time availability of information and enables quick access to prisoners' details among all the 60 correctional homes.The system proved to be a boon when in March 2020, as many as 3600 warrants at Dum Dum Central Correctional Home were charred in a fire incident. However, as the department had uploaded all the warrants through cloud, all those were regained.