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Pan-India help number, safe-city portal to be launched
Shemin Joy
DHNS
Last Updated IST

A portal to monitor safe city project that includes Bengaluru and a tracking system for investigation of sexual offences will be launched on Tuesday along with the extension of the pan-India single number (112) based response system for persons in distress to 16 states.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh will launch these initiatives, which are part of the Nirbhaya Fund.

Under the Emergency Response Support System (ERSS), a citizen could access the emergency services by dialing 112.

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Under this system, all the states have to set up a dedicated Emergency Response Centre (ERC). It will have a team of trained call-takers and dispatchers to handle emergency requests relating to assistance from police, fire and rescue, health and other emergency services.

The service has already been launched in Himachal Pradesh and Nagaland while it will now be available in Andhra Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, UP, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Puducherry, Lakshadweep, Andaman, Dadar Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu and Jammu and Kashmir.

The Safe City Implementation Monitoring (SCIM) portal is another initiative that is being launched on Tuesday.

The MHA had cleared the Safe City project in November 2017 and its first phase is being completed at a cost of Rs 2,919 crore in Ahmedabad, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Lucknow and Mumbai besides Bengaluru.

The project aims to increase CCTV surveillance in identified crime hot-spots in each city, implement automated number plate reading and drone-based surveillance, setting up women police out-posts for facilitating ease of access by any aggrieved woman to report incidence or seek assistance and patrols by women police in vulnerable areas.

These measures would be coordinated through an Integrated Smart Control Room in the city and the SCIM portal would be used.

Singh will also launch the the Investigation Tracking System for Sexual Offences (ITSSO), which is an online module available to law enforcement agencies at national, state, district and police station levels. This allows states to undertake real-time monitoring and management for completion of investigation in rape cases in two months.

It leverages the existing CCTNS data base, which covers nearly 15,000 police stations in the country. ITSSO would greatly strengthen states ability for analytics and prognosis for timely investigation and prosecution in rape cases.

The minister will also make an announcement of a special project under Nirbhaya Fund for strengthening DNA analysis capacities in the State Forensic Science Laboratories in Tamil Nadu (Chennai and Madurai), Uttar Pradesh ( Lucknow and Agra), West Bengal (Kolkata) and Maharashtra ( Mumbai).

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(Published 18 February 2019, 20:52 IST)