Telangana Police Launch Facial Recognition App, Survivor Case Tracker in Digital Push
The Telangana Police on Wednesday launched six digital initiatives aimed at improving public services and strengthening criminal investigations, including a citizen feedback centre, a unified case-management platform for survivors of violence, a mobile facial recognition application and a system to monitor the release of prisoners.
Director General of Police C.V. Anand inaugurated the initiatives at the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) headquarters in Hyderabad. Senior officials present included Director General (Law and Order) Mahesh Bhagwat, CID Director General Charu Sinha, Additional Director General of Police (PCS) Akun Sabharwal and Inspector General (Personnel and Logistics) Gajarao Bhupal.
The Citizen Feedback Centre has been set up to collect direct feedback from people who have recently used police services, including the filing of petitions and First Information Reports, e-challan services and passport verification. According to the department, the aim is to assess public experience and identify where service delivery can be improved.
The Women Safety Wing's Bharosa software will link all 35 Bharosa Centres through a single digital case file that follows each survivor's journey from first contact to closure. The platform covers registration, counselling, medical, legal and rehabilitation support. It replaces paper-based registers with statewide live dashboards and offers 23 standard reports on demand, officials said.
The CID also launched its official website, which makes information about the department available to the public.
Another initiative, the Jail Release Monitoring System, connects the National Informatics Centre's e-Prisons platform with the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems, which is used by police stations across the country. The integration is meant to improve coordination between prisons and the police. It provides automated monitoring of prisoner releases, SMS alerts to the concerned police stations and officers, statewide dashboards, AI-based analytics and prisoner searches. Automated data synchronisation and crime classification are intended to assist investigations and help identify criminal networks.
The Mobile Face Search application is an Android-based facial recognition tool supported by a database of more than 9.8 lakh photographs, which the police say returns a match in about 15 seconds. Field personnel are expected to use it to help identify suspects, deceased persons, unidentified bodies and missing persons. The announcement did not specify the safeguards governing the database, such as retention periods, access controls or the procedure for verifying a match before it is acted upon.
The DGP also released five volumes of Standard Operating Procedures for investigating officers. They cover bodily offences, property offences, crimes against women and children, special and local laws, and other offences. The manuals are intended to standardise investigative procedure, improve the quality of investigations and strengthen the prospects of securing convictions.
Police officials said the initiatives are meant to make services more transparent, accountable and efficient, while equipping officers with technology and standardised procedures. The department did not give a timeline for the full rollout of each system, or say how the new platforms would be evaluated.
