National Automated Fingerprint Identification System

Why is in news? Union Home Minister and Minister of Cooperation, Shri Amit Shah congratulates the team of National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS)for winning the Gold Award

Union Home Minister and Minister of Cooperation congratulated the team of National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS) of NCRB for winning the Gold Award under the Excellence in Government Process Reengineering for Digital Transformation Category-1 of Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG).

Under the leadership of Prime Minister and guidance of Union Home Minister, the Ministry of Home Affairs has provided NAFIS devices to all Districts, Police Commissionerates, Central and State Fingerprint Bureaus and Central agencies like NIA, CBI and NCB. NAFIS has revolutionized the fingerprint recognition system in crime control.

With this system, the work of tracing the involvement of interstate criminals in crimes is being done with greater ease, accuracy and efficiency across the country.

NAFIS has created a central database of fingerprints of criminals, which can be accessed by users from all States, Union Territories and Central Agencies.

This has resulted in a qualitative improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of the criminal detection and investigation process.

About NAFIS:

National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS) has been launched by the Home Ministry to allow a country-wide search of crime-related fingerprints.

The web-based application functions as a central information repository by consolidating fingerprint data from all states and Union Territories.

According to a 2020 report by the NCRB, it enables law enforcement agencies to upload, trace, and retrieve data from the database in real time on a 24×7 basis.

NAFIS will create a unique 10-digit national fingerprint number (NFN) for each person arrested for the crime. Using the database of fingerprints, different crimes can be linked to NFN.

It will “provide the much-needed unique identifier for every arrested person in the CCTNS (Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems)

It is developed by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

It is already implemented in Madhya Pradesh (to identify deceased persons).