The National Informatics Centre (NIC) has said that technical glitches that arose during migration of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) data to the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) platform may have caused the first information report (FIR) in the Chennai Anna University sexual assault case public on the Tamil Nadu police website.
A letter written by R Arul Mozhi Varman, senior director (IT) at NIC, ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY), to the Chennai police said that they were revisiting the code.
"Maybe due to some technical glitches and the migration from IPC to BNS, it might had happened. We have revisited the code, it is requested SCRB team to thoroughly check all the possibilities on View FIR page against all the various sensitive sections,” Mozhi Varman wrote.
“The FIR VIEW page was implemented with the logic to block FIRs under sensitive sections/subsections like 64, 67, 68, 70, 79 etc, as per the list given by the SCRB (State Crime Records Bureau)," the letter stated.
As TNM had reported earlier, all FIRs are uploaded on the Criminal Tracking Network Systems (CCTNS) and FIRs filed under certain sections including rape are not made accessible for public viewing.
The incident, which occurred on December 23 on the university’s Guindy campus in Chennai, sparked widespread outrage. A student of the university was attacked and sexually assaulted by an unidentified individual. Following the assault, the victim filed a complaint at the Kotturpuram police station, leading to the arrest of 33-year-old Gnanasekaran. He has been charged under multiple sections of the IPC and is currently under investigation.
The leak of the FIR stirred significant controversy, prompting the Madras High Court to call for action against those responsible. The Chennai Police Commissioner has earlier said that the leak could have been caused by a technical error during the process of transferring data between the IPC Act and the BNS (Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita) Act during the FIR upload.