Maintaining law and order situation is the one of the most difficult challenges of the government. The police needs to be better equipped with sophisticated information systems to combat crime and criminals. Under the SICT Program, such a system will be developed along with the necessary hardware and training of the police force.

Problems with the Existing System
There is no effective mechanism to verify past crime records of a criminal or a suspect, since records are kept in different offices around the country and there is no integrated system that puts all those records together and makes them accessible from any location. There is also no systematic way of recording information about criminals/suspects and crimes, that can help identify inter-relationships among criminals and help analyze the nature of crime in certain areas. The current process of manual verification of fingerprints is also cumbersome, lengthy and prone to human errors. Information exchange and dissemination among different police stations is also minimal.

Scope of the Project
Under the SICT Program, the following tasks will be undertaken under the e-Police project:

1. A central police information system that will be connected to major police institutions in Dhaka
2. Software for storing information about criminals/ suspects for intelligence work
3. Software for digitally storing information about criminal cases including warrants
4. Software for digitally verifying fingerprints instantly
5. Interactive police website that will contain an updated list of top criminals, relevant press releases, searchable database of unidentified missing persons or road-accident hurt persons
6. Thorough IT training for the police force, including several thousand officers and staff of all ranks
7. Necessary hardware resources will be provided to the institutions
8. LAN will be established at all institutions

Beneficiary Groups
The beneficiary groups of the e-Police project will be:

1. Citizens
2. Officials and staff of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police force
3. Officials and staff of the Ministry of Home
4. Officials and staff of the Criminal courts

Benefits to Citizens
The benefits that citizens will get after successful completion of this project are listed below:

1. Citizens will benefit from improved law and order situation
2. Citizens can use the website to know about criminals, and identify missing hurt persons in police custody

Improved Governance
The ways in which governance will improve after successful completion of this project are listed below:

• Easy verification of past crime records and warrants
• Efficient fingerprint verification
• Different institutions can exchange information easily and effectively

Detailed cost break-up of e-police system may be seen in Appendix-2.