Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has withdrawn its services to the Andhra Pradesh police department due to pending bills for the last three years. As a result, the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and System (CCTNS), a crucial technological tool used by the police, went down in many districts across the state, leaving the AP police department handicapped.
CCTNS is a system that integrates data from over 15,000 police stations nationwide, allowing easy collection, storage, analysis, retrieval, and transfer of information. Since its implementation in AP in 2012, the police have heavily relied on CCTNS for crime detection and tracking the progress of court cases.
The latest reports suggest that the government had not cleared the bill owed to TCS for the past three years, leading to the withdrawal of maintenance services.
Since TCS’s departure, serious issues have arisen with the CCTNS system, and the police department is unable to rectify them internally. Districts such as Guntur, Kurnool, and Chittoor have reported complaints regarding the system’s malfunction.
S V Rajasekhar Babu, the DIG for technical services, claimed to have no knowledge of the CCTNS problem. He neither confirmed nor denied the pending payment and withdrawal of services by TCS.
The reliance on CCTNS is high among station house officers (SHOs) and crime branch police, who utilize it to track ongoing investigations and update new crimes. However, due to the current situation, they are unable to fulfill the requirement of updating every First Information Report (FIR) in CCTNS on the same day.
The CCTNS services have also been down in the AP Police Seva mobile application and the official website of AP Police for over a week.
